Become a recruitment consultant. Annoy the world.

The day after the Graduate Recruitment Company debacle, at 8.44am (I know, I checked the clock) I got another call from a guy who called last week to find out if I was interested in working as a recruitment consultant. “Oh did I already call you. Sorry I must have forgotten to take you off my list” he said. A lie, I’m sure. He then went on to ask if I’d changed my mind. He even said that they might have a job at a branch more local to me, Watford. Having had such a bad experience the day before and feeling somewhat demoralised I wasn’t prepared to dismiss him straight away. “How about I call you back in a couple of days time?” And he did. And, rather foolishly, I agreed to an interview on Monday. He’d already sent me over some details about the job, so I gave them a proper look. It really wasn’t me. Basically it was everything I’d hated about my previous job multiplied to the nth degree. But what other option did I have?

A short while later my phone rang once again. It was a recruitment consultant wondering if I was interested in a much better job working for a Media Monitoring company near the Tower of London. She described the job. Basically I’d be reading newspapers and checking the internet for stories about whatever client I was working for. It sounded great. I was definitely interested and eagerly awaited her promised email containing more information. She asked me to look it over and give her a call back by the end of the day. It didn’t come. To make matters worse my email started playing up. I called back. It turned out that she hadn’t sent it. I waited. It didn’t come. Thursday turned to Friday and I called back. She claimed that she couldn’t find the job spec and that she’d send it to me when she was resent it by the company. She did, however, say that they were very interested in me. Finally today (after I called twice) I got the information and a promise to arrange an interview for me on Wednesday. Hopefully she’ll call back tomorrow. Still, I’ve had to jump through a few hoops to get there.

Anyway, in the meantime I still l had this interview for the recruitment consultant job. When I’d called him up on Friday to make sure that the interview was still on, he’d promised to call me on Sunday at 4pm to talk me through the interview. By Sunday, when the phone call finally came, I’d had serious doubts about the job. It really wasn’t for me. I’d just be miserable. After consulting a number of friends I’d decided to be honest about my misgivings when he called. I was pretty up front with the guy about how I didn’t think the job was right for me. I first asked him what a typical day would be like as I figured this would be a good way of illustrating why I wouldn’t be suitable. Alarm bells started ringing when he told me that my regular hours would be from 8am -6PM (so you can bet that, in reality, I’d have to stay a fair bit later). He continued to describe what seemed like a nightmare day for me and as he spoke I was becoming even more convinced that this simply wasn’t for me. By the time he told me my basic salary (£16k, with commission not kicking in until after 3 months, by which point, if some miracle had happened and I’d got the job, I’m sure I’d probably have been sacked), I was utterly convinced that I would hate the job, even resent it in the same way I resented my last job for its low pay and long hours. This job was, just from the point of view of pay and hours, would have been even worse than my last. I would be spending even more of my time on the phone being interrupted by callers, and under pressure to hit targets. I’d probably have had a heart attack within 6 months.

So I told him the job wasn’t for me. Quite emphatically in fact, yet I couldn’t get him to say that he thought it would be best if I didn’t come in. Although he admitted that if I said all that I had said on the phone to him to the guy who would be interviewing me, I wouldn’t get the job. None the less, he kept insisting that I should go to the interview anyway. It didn’t seem to matter that I’d just told him how bad I was in a sales environment and how much I really wouldn’t like it. I emphasised the point by saying that, had I seen the job advertised, I wouldn’t have even considered applying for it. I simply don’t get a buzz out of making sales.

I even gave him a way of making the job appeal to me. I said, “I suppose you could argue that it’s a worthwhile job because you’re helping to find people work.”

“Nobody” according to him “does this sort of job to help people.”

By now, any shred of doubt I had in my mind about not taking the interview had evaporated. He was giving me a hard, but completely untargeted sales pitch for some reason. I felt sure I’d made that perfectly clear, yet he continued trying to say that it was still a good idea to go to the interview. “I can see you’re in two minds about the job” he said at one point. He extolled the virtues of his company, saying that they weren’t like any other recruitment agency. Oddly enough his hard sell approach to forcing the job on me made it clear that they were just like any other Recruitment Agency. Maybe they were a little worse.

We left it that I would call today if I wanted to cancel the interview.

I called, but he wasn’t available, so I left a message and sent an email, asking that the interview be cancelled.

It really is odd that he spent so long trying to convince me to come along when I clearly felt that I was, in so many ways, completely wrong for the job. I even said that I felt it would be a waste of time going but he shrugged this off, telling me that it wouldn’t.

I can’t exactly worry about turning down today’s interview. I didn’t want the job and would never have got it. If I had it would have just made me miserable.

Anyway, I’ve come to an important conclusion. Recruitment consultants really are full of shit. At least now I know that I’m completely unsuited to being a Recruitment Consultant. I’m just not that much of an arsehole.