Just when you think the world of recruitment cannot stoop any lower, some determined hacks find a way to thwart your optimism.

In Freaking Hired!, I mentioned the commercial methodology of aggregators. The job boards that use bots to scrape job ads to post on their own sites, with subsequent applications proving their concept, which they then upsell for a fee.

Actually, it makes some sense. The company gets some free advertising and some candidates, and they have the option of investment to promote roles, if they want it.

Enter the charlatanic hordes with a new variation.

Some quack recruiters get a whiff of a job and – while having no relationship at all with the hiring company – advertise it themselves.

When they have a passable selection of CVs (and after getting the candidates themselves to tweak these to match the roles), they spaff these out to attempt to win the contract. Of course, presenting this as evidence of their expertise in the field.

For the recruiter, the CVs just need to be good enough to build a picture of credible market activity.

For the ‘candidates’, well, they are busting a gut to get a CV in for an ‘urgent’ role, when in fact they are supporting the recruiter’s attempts to snare an exclusive deal.

Talk about brazen and it’s happening more and more.

I was contacted myself about a role supporting the CEO of a mature start-up.

Now, that is code for a business that has been running for about 8-10 years and is still a chaotic steaming pile of faecal delight.

You know the scenario. Paranoid founder/owner who won’t let go and thinks he knows it all. A business running on borrowed time, money and promises. Staff burning out on a weekly basis.

You wouldn’t want to touch that with somebody else’s bargepole.

Now, this job has been posted for months, because it’s a unicorn job working for a banana.

So, smelling eau de desperation, about 10 agencies (and counting) have entered the fray and are posting ads for this job all over the internet. Using the company brand and citing the owner’s name.

Poor old oblivious CEO hasn’t a clue that his brand is being kicked about like an old bucket. For him, the world doesn’t exist outside his own four walls.

The recruiters on the patch don’t know anything about what is a grim job anyway, so cannot even effectively spray it gold.

‘Candidates’ are being led up the garden path and are of course then being ghosted when the CVs don’t even get past the spam box.

And the business brand goes down the pan faster than you can say ‘Ratners’, with word travelling quickly that the CEO is a headcase tyre-kicker. Which he probably is and for a while has kept under wraps. Until now.

All these little boutique agencies using jobseekers to scurry around and prop up the work effort, so they can push an infinitesimally slender long shot for gaining a contract and expanding out of their spare rooms.

A pyramid scheme for recruiters, with the collateral damage of jobseekers and the organisation itself sinking further into the mire.

A tomb in it job, no less.

unsplash-logoSimon Matzinger