Malcolm, I sense an element of extreme angst in what you have written. I agree 110% with it especially as it effects older workers.

I went for a lengthy period applying for positions about 5 years ago and getting no responses, not even an automatic acknowledgement (How hard is it to generate and send one?). I spoke with one of the agency helping older workers back into work and rewrote my CV in a way that masked my age and some of my qualifications. Voila! The requests for interview rained down from on high. Unfortunately as you walked in the door for the physical interview you could see the shock horror at who they were interviewing and that they had lost all interest in you as a potential candidate. Most interviewers at the agencies seemed so young as to be barely out of nappies.

15 years ago I went through a similar process when I considered taking a package and leaving my then employer. Interestingly the UK was doing an amount of recruitment in Oz at the time. The difference in attitude between the Oz recruiters and their UK counterparts was like comparing Qantas to all the competitors. The UK recruiters acknowledged receipt of fax applications next day. There were typically phone interviews within several days of the application. You were then acknowledged as being unsuccessful, typically before the first approach or acknowledgement from an Oz recruiter was received if that ever came.

I now work for myself as a contractor, the only positions worth considering are those placed directly by the employer. The agencies are a waste of time to respond to. Worse, the agencies can't be bothered considering anyone who doesn't respond on the day of the ad placement.

DKit

I hope they are numbered.

Now I am unemployed, I am looking for some manual work.

There is a food manufacturer around the corner. I live next door to a key worker there. He complains that the employment agency only provides dud workers. I asked him to see I i can work there given I have reasonable intelligence and have been a labourer and factory worker for many years.

No such luck. I am still waiting to hear for one job for an employment agency I hooked up with.

And I can outlift and out work most guys at my gym, despite being double their age.

There are some things that are really wrong in our desire to cut costs everywhere. You should be able to contact an employer directly.

I was on the books of an employment agency for about three years, and all I ever got from them was an annual Christmas card. When I subsequently got a job due to a contact, I was still required to waste an hour going round to their recruiting agency so they could tick me off and get their cut. If these parasites are going to the wall, that's great news. They already have places reserved on the 'B' Ark.

http://www.geoffwilkins.net/fragments/Adams.htm

...The problem is of course; you need to be Chinese to work for a Chinese company, and Korean to work for $4ph with an Australian company! Nothing to do with age at all!

...But of course, the King "IS" wearing cloths isn't he? Or is John Howard Naked and Tony Abbott clothed?

Thank you so much for this essay, Malcolm, and for reminding me why I hang around forums like OLO.

I do SO hope you are right. And if - and it's a big IF - we are finally waking up to the recruitment industry, hopefully it won't stop there. I hope that the entire privatisation consultancy racket that has played us all for suckers over these last couple of decades goes down the gurgler as well.

One area you didn't touch on, however, was the hideously expensive Centrelink recruitment consultancy racket, that pilfers the public purse feeding off the misery of the unemployed. These parasites do nothing to help the unemployed; they justify their pilfering by making the unemployed run the gauntlet of creatively useless weekly 'proofs' that they are really, really, REALLY trying to get work that just isn't there to get.

The public is still being kept in the dark about just how much of the annual welfare budget is frittered away on private consultancy, instead of being paid to the people who really need it.

Killarney,

I'm also sceptical in regard to the usefulness of Centrelink's 'recruitment consultants', it's an example of ideology over effectiveness, they just divert taxpayers' money into the private sector.