Do Agencies Find better Jobs – Yes
Do agencies find prospects better jobs? The answer is not necessarily, but sometimes yes they can find jobs that are better and for two main reasons.
The first reason that agencies can help you to find a better job is because it is their full time employment to find jobs. Have you ever heard the saying "It's a job finding a job"? Well, it is. For employment agencies finding jobs is their bread and butter which means that they know the jobs that are out there. They know when something new has come up. They know who's hiring at the time. They know the new companies setting up shop who are going to need new staff. This is their job to know this. An individual who's been looking for a job for 2, 3 or 4 weeks could not possibly know all this information. Especially not having the same resources and tools that agencies invest in. So is it possible then to assume that an agency is going to know of more job possibilities that you the job searcher haven't found? Yes it is.
The second reason that an agency can help in finding better jobs for a candidate is that there are many companies, especially large corporations, that only use agencies for their recruitment needs. When a company is so big, the costs of having an onsite recruitment staff can be expensive. Hiring a department full time to do hiring is a lot to spend on annual salaries, office space and supplies and thus leaves the option for many companies to outsource. Who do they outsource to? Employment agencies. Many companies will take in resumes directly from candidates, but when the company is that large and there are so many possible departments for employment, are your details necessarily going to get to the right person? Not likely. What tends to happen is that the agencies are informed of an opening. This then prompts the agencies to prepare potential candidates for the role. The details of these candidates are then sent directly to the department in which the vacancy is. This way the hiring manager spends as little time as possible looking at resumes and choosing the most ideal candidates for the job. This can still take hours depending on how many agencies are involved and how many candidates are sent over. For a lot of the larger companies direct recruitment is too expensive and time consuming that they will simply give the task to an agency to complete. With many of these jobs being with large, well established companies there is a good chance that you could be missing out on a better job possibility by not using an agency.
All that being said, there is no guarantee that an agency is going to be able to help you. Every agency has their own separate clients and one agency may have one vacancy that is different from another. Some companies will only do direct recruitment. If an agency charges you, the candidate, money to use their service then they are not doing their job properly. Legitimate agencies charge a percentage of the job salary to the company and none of the costs are paid by the candidate. There are plenty of legitimate agencies out there to choose from, but it's not necessarily a good thing either to have a bunch of agencies out there looking for you. It's always best to use one or two quality companies that you trust. That way you can be sure that your resume isn't floating out there to 100's of companies. Some may argue the more exposure the better, but this is not always the case. When companies start to the see the same resume over and over again from different agencies it does not impress. It is a sign of desperation and companies aren't looking for candidates that will just work anywhere. They want people that are looking for a serious career opportunity.
Finding a job can be hard. Finding the right job is even harder. The best thing you can do for yourself in finding a job is find the right agency, do a little research yourself and have patience. It's out there.
