Let me go straight to the point.

Who are this Recruiters?
Recruitters are individuals employed by companies to serve as an intermediary between job seekers and potential employers.

The big problem with recruiters is that they are typically paid based on two criteria: the salary of the jobs they put people in, and how many people they place. What common strategies do recruiters use to lure job applicants, and why are they bad for you? Let’s take a look…

1. The Span Messages (Through Email or Mobile)

This set of recruiters have a way of getting your numbers, sometimes they go to seminars and ask for phone numbers, or organize a fake seminars where people are asked to drop their numbers. They also get your numbers from all this marketers striking a deal with them etc They now contact you about an open position, that doesn't exist. The conversation (either via email or telephone) usually starts off with some praise (like “I reviewed your resume and I think you have some fantastic technical skills that could apply to this position I have open”) and then a pitch for a job that they’re trying to fill. someone found YOU, and decided that YOUR skills would match THEIR job. You should know it’s a scam. Examples of these people can be found at the Nairaland job sections.

How can you tell it’s a scam?

Obvious ones include a recruiter who emails you, praising your skills as a match for this job, and then proceeds to describe a job in a completely different field from your background. That recruiter is bullshitting you, and is really not interested in finding “the best fit.” They just want to collect the commission. Other signs include jobs that are somewhat in your field, but not necessarily fitted to your skill set. Most of the time, if a recruiter says “I have a client who…” they’re lying. Most recruiters don’t have exclusive locks on jobs; they get their jobs the same way you do, they just happen to know who the hiring manager is and thus can make more direct contact. Submitting your resume the old fashioned way still gets it seen by the same person.

2. The Vague, Rewritten Job Posting

Most recruiters working for staffing companies don’t have exclusive contracts to offer a job, actually screen candidates or are otherwise directly involved in the hiring process. Their role is largely self-defined, where they match candidates to a job posting; their success is dependent upon their network of contacts and their ability to get their candidates directly in front of the hiring manager.
As a result, most recruiters are pretty vague about the company they’re posting for when they write a job posting. They’ll usually write something along the lines of “My client…” or “We have a client who…” They won’t post any identifying information about the company in the ad, and for good reason: if you knew what company was hiring, you could go apply for the job yourself!
Recruiters will often post job descriptions that are vague, and more often than not, rewritten from the original. Recruiters are aiming to get the widest possible number of people interested in the posting, since that increases the applicant pool and increases the chances they’ll win a commission by making a placement. The result is that they will rewrite the job description, often adding keywords that they think might be related, and end up posting a job description that is vague, keyword-filled, and really useless for knowing what job they’re actually trying to find a candidate to fill.
This is bad for you because it means that you cannot target yourself to a particular position as easily. Most hiring managers want to know how you’re going to satisfy their needs, and a shotgun approach to providing such satisfaction will turn them off. If they’re looking for someone with Postgres experience they don’t probably care that you worked with MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server, for example. Speaking of rewriting…

3. The Rewriting Of The Candidate’s Resume

This is the worst part of it.
Recruiters will often ask candidates to send them a resume in Word format. This is often for two reasons: first, because there is no contract in place between the company and the recruiter, the recruiter doesn’t want to have the company be able to hire the applicant directly, thus bypassing the recruiter and his commission. The Word-based resume allows them to remove the contact information of the candidate before sending the information along. But second, and more dubious, many times recruiters rewrite resumes.
That’s right: they’ll rewrite your resume to “match” the job description.
The reasons this is bad for you should be obvious: lying on your resume is typically grounds for automatic rejection or termination, regardless of who was responsible (most employers won’t take “the recruiter rewrote it!” as an excuse). In addition, most recruiters are not technical but are convinced that keywords sell job candidates, so they’ll load up resumes with tons of bullshit terms, trying to match the resume to the job description to improve their chances of success. Finally, it’s possible you may not see the finished product, meaning you could get asked about something on your resume you’ve never even seen or heard of (that one is awkward).

4. The Pre-Interview Interview At The Recruiter’s Office

Most Nairalander's have Narrated their ordeals about this.
In recruiter world, this often takes the form of a pre-interview interview. It serves two purposes, both bad for the candidate.
First and foremost, it causes you to make an investment in the position you’re applying for. You’ve invested the time to dress up, keep an appointment, and answer questions. Recruiters will tell you the purpose of the interview is to make sure you’re sane and qualified, but I’m firmly convinced that it’s really designed to have you make an investment of your time and energy in the recruiter and the role.
The second (and often more dubious) reason is to get you to fill out paperwork for the recruiter. Remembering that the recruiter has no contract with the companies they’re trying to recruit for, many try and end run around this by making you sign paperwork (usually as part of a “job application”) promising not to accept a position with any company they put you in contact with, unless that offer comes through them. The goal here is to get one of the two parties in a situation where the recruiter can almost be guaranteed their commission; this has nothing to do with protecting the interests of the candidate, and everything to do with protecting the interests of the recruiter.
Now that the candidate is under contract, it’s time for the recruiter’s next trick…

5. The Unsolicited sending Of Your Resume All Over Town

You applied for a single position. You sent the recruiter a copy of your resume in Word, came down to his office, spent a couple hours being “interviewed” and signed a piece of paper promising to inform the recruiter if you got a job thanks to their efforts. Turns out the role you wanted either got filled or you weren’t a good match for. You move on to your next job prospect. And then the worst thing in the world happens.
The next company refuse to call you in for an interview because they’ve already seen your resume. Seems that your recruiter sent it to them last week, but the company you’ve applied to doesn’t want to pay a 25% commission to hire someone. They know you’re under contract not to take their job if they don’t pay the commission. And so they aren’t able to work with you at this time.
Now that the recruiter has you under contract, he’s free to do whatever he wants with your information. This is a curse upon your house. Every place the recruiter now sends your information is off-limits to you if they decide the other candidate is cheaper. You’ve just lost control of your job search.
Sure, you can ask your recruiter to stop, but the damage has probably already been done. A recruiter’s success at their job depends on their ability to know pretty much everything going on in a given job field, which means there’s a chance everyone hiring for your field within 50 miles has gotten your resume and now can’t hire you.

6. The Complete Disregard For Your Preferences

By now we’ve established what recruiters are after in the process. This often leads to recruiters putting you up for a job that you have no interest in winning. The vagueness of the job posting, as well as the vagueness of most recruiters, means that you may not have a good understanding of what job you’re interviewing for. You might have wasted more than two hours in their office, plus travel time, plus scheduling and rescheduling the interview, plus actually having the interview, only to find out that they had no interest in the job but your money.
Recruiters are not really interested in taking a candidate, finding the best position for them, placing them in that position and making sure they’re happy. If they were, they would work with a candidate to find them a role that fit their experience and preferences, and go the extra mile. To date, I’ve never seen it.

7. Telling You Things To Boost Your Ego, But Being Full Of Lies

A recruiter will tell you lots of things, aimed at boosting your ego and also convincing you to work with the recruiter. They’ll tell you things like “I want to help you get the highest salary possible” or “I’m working on this for you.” All lies. Recruiters’ commissions are based on salary, so of course they want to get you the highest salary possible – for their own benefit. But remember: the commission a company pays to hire you will inevitably reduce the available cash for a given position, reducing your salary offer. And since a starting salary is often the place companies start from when giving raises, you will permanently reduce your lifetime earnings.
As for a recruiter “working on this for you” that’s bullshit too. The recruiter is working on it for themselves. They’ve been tasked with filling that job. They don’t care if it’s you that fills it or the next guy who applies; they just want to get the job out of their portfolio.
Working with recruiters is also a lot of bad news. Recruiters have three lines that they like to give candidates after interviews. The first is “the company has decided not to hire for this role at this time.” The second is “the company has already filled the position.” And the third is “the company has decided you’re not a good fit for the role.”
The company never decides not to hire; they decide the commission would be too expensive and so that’s what they tell the recruiter they’ve decided. Either the recruiter is too stupid to know he’s being lied to or doesn’t care; that’s what he tells you.
The second line, about filling the position, may well be true. It may also be a knee-jerk reaction of the company to being contacted by a recruiter. Most companies will bite on a recruiter if the resume they get is top notch, but since recruiters take a shotgun approach to getting folks hired, most of the time this is not the case (you may well be the finest resume he has; but then again, if he’s rewritten it, maybe it sucks now). Either way, working with a recruiter is going to feel a lot like always being late to the party.

OK

Thanks for sharing, OP.

Word!

true

Op, you mean you can't summarise this?

ok

G

You should've highlighted some advantages as well...
Made the post look like an hate-post..

virud:
You should've highlighted some advantages as well...
Made the post look like an hate-post..

I don't want it to look too lengthy as already is but I will see what I can do about that

Read only the points...op u try

But Op, how did you know all these? Seems you were once a recruiter and into this sh't...

No insults intended

FP material. Job seekers should take note sha.

Hmmm

OP the caption almost got me fooled at first but I'm glad I opened and read through it. You just wrote it as it should be but some applicants have testified about their miracle of getting a job through recruiters as well.

Are you saying these recruiters are the bane of
unemployment in our country? Is this situation the same as the biblical account of Jael giving Sisera a glass of milk when he asked for ordinary water, only for her to turn around and finish him completely?

Where will job seekers run to now?

amicable09:
OP the caption almost got me fooled at first but I'm glad I opened and read through it. You just wrote it as it should be but some applicants have testified about their miracle of getting a job through recruiters as well.

Are you saying these recruiters are the bane of
unemployment in our country? Is this situation the same as the biblical account of Jael giving Sisera a glass of milk when he asked for ordinary water, only for her to turn around and finish him completely?

Where will job seekers run to now?

Most of this job recruiters are no different from the unemployed graduate. Only few of them are real, majority have no client or company, all they need is certain numbers of graduate, ask them to pay a registration fee, and that'all. A win-win for them. Am not saying all of them are bad but am saying most of them are. They are also job seeker. I will try and open another thread on how to identify a good recruitment firm but I'm trying to avoid being BAN by the Mod.

Spam messages are just the worst. Straight from the devil's incarnates.

E

[img]http://media0./media/O9BraovCVneJa/giphy.gif[/img]

Okay.
Let it go

Ok nah

nice write up OP....

sincerely........i wish you will permit me to add more based on what i saw this morning....
all this job agents in Ikota Shopping Complex giving a pretty Nigerian graduate the advice of her life on how to arrange her cv,,,,but you know the girl needs a job she just listened to the man telling her right like 5 page resume before she can get a graduate job..........i pity the poor girl but adviced her to check on Naira land....and keep the search.

Ok

Job seekers don enter wahala, do this , don't do that, nawa oo

Akawogbekun....

Op, you will only make the scammers wise up. Cos job seekers won't learn from this

Ok, in jack Bauer's Voice"Copy dat.

Took time 2 read d long post n it was worth it. Weldone kinibigdeal

Too long

chiedu7:
E

Why can't some people keep mum if they don't know what to comment

kinibigdeal:
Let me go straight to the point.

Who are this Recruiters?
Recruitters are individuals employed by companies to serve as an intermediary between job seekers and potential employers.

The big problem with recruiters is that they are typically paid based on two criteria: the salary of the jobs they put people in, and how many people they place. What common strategies do recruiters use to lure job applicants, and why are they bad for you? Let’s take a look…

1. The Span Messages (Through Email or Mobile)

This set of recruiters have a way of getting your numbers, sometimes they go to seminars and ask for phone numbers, or organize a fake seminars where people are asked to drop their numbers. They also get your numbers from all this marketers striking a deal with them etc They now contact you about an open position, that doesn't exist. The conversation (either via email or telephone) usually starts off with some praise (like “I reviewed your resume and I think you have some fantastic technical skills that could apply to this position I have open”) and then a pitch for a job that they’re trying to fill. someone found YOU, and decided that YOUR skills would match THEIR job. You should know it’s a scam. Examples of these people can be found at the Nairaland job sections.

How can you tell it’s a scam?

Obvious ones include a recruiter who emails you, praising your skills as a match for this job, and then proceeds to describe a job in a completely different field from your background. That recruiter is bullshitting you, and is really not interested in finding “the best fit.” They just want to collect the commission. Other signs include jobs that are somewhat in your field, but not necessarily fitted to your skill set. Most of the time, if a recruiter says “I have a client who…” they’re lying. Most recruiters don’t have exclusive locks on jobs; they get their jobs the same way you do, they just happen to know who the hiring manager is and thus can make more direct contact. Submitting your resume the old fashioned way still gets it seen by the same person.

2. The Vague, Rewritten Job Posting

Most recruiters working for staffing companies don’t have exclusive contracts to offer a job, actually screen candidates or are otherwise directly involved in the hiring process. Their role is largely self-defined, where they match candidates to a job posting; their success is dependent upon their network of contacts and their ability to get their candidates directly in front of the hiring manager.
As a result, most recruiters are pretty vague about the company they’re posting for when they write a job posting. They’ll usually write something along the lines of “My client…” or “We have a client who…” They won’t post any identifying information about the company in the ad, and for good reason: if you knew what company was hiring, you could go apply for the job yourself!
Recruiters will often post job descriptions that are vague, and more often than not, rewritten from the original. Recruiters are aiming to get the widest possible number of people interested in the posting, since that increases the applicant pool and increases the chances they’ll win a commission by making a placement. The result is that they will rewrite the job description, often adding keywords that they think might be related, and end up posting a job description that is vague, keyword-filled, and really useless for knowing what job they’re actually trying to find a candidate to fill.
This is bad for you because it means that you cannot target yourself to a particular position as easily. Most hiring managers want to know how you’re going to satisfy their needs, and a shotgun approach to providing such satisfaction will turn them off. If they’re looking for someone with Postgres experience they don’t probably care that you worked with MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server, for example. Speaking of rewriting…

3. The Rewriting Of The Candidate’s Resume

This is the worst part of it.
Recruiters will often ask candidates to send them a resume in Word format. This is often for two reasons: first, because there is no contract in place between the company and the recruiter, the recruiter doesn’t want to have the company be able to hire the applicant directly, thus bypassing the recruiter and his commission. The Word-based resume allows them to remove the contact information of the candidate before sending the information along. But second, and more dubious, many times recruiters rewrite resumes.
That’s right: they’ll rewrite your resume to “match” the job description.
The reasons this is bad for you should be obvious: lying on your resume is typically grounds for automatic rejection or termination, regardless of who was responsible (most employers won’t take “the recruiter rewrote it!” as an excuse). In addition, most recruiters are not technical but are convinced that keywords sell job candidates, so they’ll load up resumes with tons of bullshit terms, trying to match the resume to the job description to improve their chances of success. Finally, it’s possible you may not see the finished product, meaning you could get asked about something on your resume you’ve never even seen or heard of (that one is awkward).

4. The Pre-Interview Interview At The Recruiter’s Office

Most Nairalander's have Narrated their ordeals about this.
In recruiter world, this often takes the form of a pre-interview interview. It serves two purposes, both bad for the candidate.
First and foremost, it causes you to make an investment in the position you’re applying for. You’ve invested the time to dress up, keep an appointment, and answer questions. Recruiters will tell you the purpose of the interview is to make sure you’re sane and qualified, but I’m firmly convinced that it’s really designed to have you make an investment of your time and energy in the recruiter and the role.
The second (and often more dubious) reason is to get you to fill out paperwork for the recruiter. Remembering that the recruiter has no contract with the companies they’re trying to recruit for, many try and end run around this by making you sign paperwork (usually as part of a “job application”) promising not to accept a position with any company they put you in contact with, unless that offer comes through them. The goal here is to get one of the two parties in a situation where the recruiter can almost be guaranteed their commission; this has nothing to do with protecting the interests of the candidate, and everything to do with protecting the interests of the recruiter.
Now that the candidate is under contract, it’s time for the recruiter’s next trick…

5. The Unsolicited sending Of Your Resume All Over Town

You applied for a single position. You sent the recruiter a copy of your resume in Word, came down to his office, spent a couple hours being “interviewed” and signed a piece of paper promising to inform the recruiter if you got a job thanks to their efforts. Turns out the role you wanted either got filled or you weren’t a good match for. You move on to your next job prospect. And then the worst thing in the world happens.
The next company refuse to call you in for an interview because they’ve already seen your resume. Seems that your recruiter sent it to them last week, but the company you’ve applied to doesn’t want to pay a 25% commission to hire someone. They know you’re under contract not to take their job if they don’t pay the commission. And so they aren’t able to work with you at this time.
Now that the recruiter has you under contract, he’s free to do whatever he wants with your information. This is a curse upon your house. Every place the recruiter now sends your information is off-limits to you if they decide the other candidate is cheaper. You’ve just lost control of your job search.
Sure, you can ask your recruiter to stop, but the damage has probably already been done. A recruiter’s success at their job depends on their ability to know pretty much everything going on in a given job field, which means there’s a chance everyone hiring for your field within 50 miles has gotten your resume and now can’t hire you.

6. The Complete Disregard For Your Preferences

By now we’ve established what recruiters are after in the process. This often leads to recruiters putting you up for a job that you have no interest in winning. The vagueness of the job posting, as well as the vagueness of most recruiters, means that you may not have a good understanding of what job you’re interviewing for. You might have wasted more than two hours in their office, plus travel time, plus scheduling and rescheduling the interview, plus actually having the interview, only to find out that they had no interest in the job but your money.
Recruiters are not really interested in taking a candidate, finding the best position for them, placing them in that position and making sure they’re happy. If they were, they would work with a candidate to find them a role that fit their experience and preferences, and go the extra mile. To date, I’ve never seen it.

7. Telling You Things To Boost Your Ego, But Being Full Of Lies

A recruiter will tell you lots of things, aimed at boosting your ego and also convincing you to work with the recruiter. They’ll tell you things like “I want to help you get the highest salary possible” or “I’m working on this for you.” All lies. Recruiters’ commissions are based on salary, so of course they want to get you the highest salary possible – for their own benefit. But remember: the commission a company pays to hire you will inevitably reduce the available cash for a given position, reducing your salary offer. And since a starting salary is often the place companies start from when giving raises, you will permanently reduce your lifetime earnings.
As for a recruiter “working on this for you” that’s bullshit too. The recruiter is working on it for themselves. They’ve been tasked with filling that job. They don’t care if it’s you that fills it or the next guy who applies; they just want to get the job out of their portfolio.
Working with recruiters is also a lot of bad news. Recruiters have three lines that they like to give candidates after interviews. The first is “the company has decided not to hire for this role at this time.” The second is “the company has already filled the position.” And the third is “the company has decided you’re not a good fit for the role.”
The company never decides not to hire; they decide the commission would be too expensive and so that’s what they tell the recruiter they’ve decided. Either the recruiter is too stupid to know he’s being lied to or doesn’t care; that’s what he tells you.
The second line, about filling the position, may well be true. It may also be a knee-jerk reaction of the company to being contacted by a recruiter. Most companies will bite on a recruiter if the resume they get is top notch, but since recruiters take a shotgun approach to getting folks hired, most of the time this is not the case (you may well be the finest resume he has; but then again, if he’s rewritten it, maybe it sucks now). Either way, working with a recruiter is going to feel a lot like always being late to the party.

I think its proper to streamline d op topic to Graduate Recruiters so dt u will not b giving wrong perception and info with a good heart.
Most of d information above won't b correct for recruiters for experience level which are more transparent. Thanks.