Working With Employment Specialists – A Cautionary Tale

As part of my recent mini-series on career management, one of my posts talked about search firms, recruiters and employment agencies and how they operate.  In that article, I described placement agencies which charge an upfront fee, and basically advised job seekers to avoid these types of companies at all costs, as well as to read any documentation that you are asked by an agency to sign.  As a timely reminder of what you might stand to lose if you do not heed these words of caution, a news report which appeared only yesterday tells the story of one unemployed woman who, despite shelling out $5,000 and verbally being promised a job, later discovered that the contract that she signed did not in fact guarantee her work at all.  The article also raised the interesting but crucial distinction between employment agencies and career consulting firms.

The placement agencies that I described in my previous post are directly in the business of matching job seekers to vacant positions.  Essentially, they justify the charges that they make to job seekers as being in exchange for arranging the whole placement process with potential employers