This article is from page 15 of the 2007-03-20 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 15 JPG
WARNING bells have been sounded about rogue recruitment agencies who lie to applicants about why they didn’t get a job, send on their CVs without per- mission and bill employers for ‘ghost’ staff they never employed.
A major agency with offices in Gal- way, Cork, Sligo, Dublin and Athlone this week lashed out at, “falling stand- ards, unscrupulous behaviour in an already fragmented and unregulated Th eveLbrsiam Yaa
SUeteBrceuelianets sme ClUbamlOm bKorTN OMI: booming under a national skills short- age in a range of professions and indus- tries. Now the managing director of one of Ireland’s longest established recruit- ment consultancies, Collins McNicho- las, Colman Collins, has been lobbying for nearly seven years for the industry to pep Ker MUI IKeen
“I firmly believe that new legislation is urgently needed if the recruitment industry is ever to be recognised as a provider of professional services.
“The current situation is reaching crisis point. What we have now is a erowing number of agencies — 707 by December 2006 — chasing a reducing number of candidates.
‘This is a recipe for disaster, with em- ployers and job seekers both being short changed in the process.”
Among the horror stories which are brought to the agency are those of cli-
ents whose CVs are sent to firms with- out their permission and who are then bullied by the agency, which demands to represent them.
In other cases, employers complain that some agencies lie to clients about why they didn’t get a job, falsify refer- ence checks or change the client’s email address to get around employers’ IT tracking systems that would otherwise recognise that they already have a cli- ent’s CV.
Several employers have complained that some agencies present invoices for fictional candidates who were never hired by the employer.
One employer who contacted Col- lins McNicholls said that submitting an invoice in excess of the agreed agency rates was a regular tactic of one particu- lar agency.
While many agencies maintain scru- pulous dealings, Collins said, “Every week, one of my consultants tells me a horror story of an employer or a job seeker, about the unprofessional behav- iour and practices of some recruitment agencies.’
Collins said that a “recruitment agen- cy in Ireland can be established with great ease by anyone really, with no formal qualification required and very little monitoring of activities, so the re- sults of the present situation are not only predictable but inevitable…Legislation is the only answer and the sooner the eres wae