The Temp Agency Scam


Pundits love to yap about how easy it is to get a job these days.

Horseshit!

Sure, there are some shit jobs you can work, and you can plug into the gig economy at will and get exploited, but, otherwise, it's as miserable as ever trying to get a job.  The job listings are filled with scammers and companies that want to exploit you.  Assuming you avoid those pitfalls, there is still the employment agency ads, the jobs of which are nonexistent.  What the staffing agency is trying to do is to get you to come in, so you can be added to their candidate database.  So when an employer shows up with a job order, they can pull out a candidate from the database and send her or him over.  Then they write up an ad for the job they already filled and post it.

Isn't that illegal though?  Like false advertising?

Well, probably, but good luck proving it.  They'd spin the procedure as just making sure they have a backup in case the first candidate craps out.

That's a lie, of course.  They would just pull another candidate out of the database.  What they want is to keep the candidate pipeline going in case that type of job order ever comes through again.  Most likely, you'll never hear from them again.  If you do, it'll be some ghastly temp job.  I'll provide an example.  I was hard up and got a customer service job through a staffing agency.  My buddy had worked the job before, and even though the staffing agency was blowing smoke up my ass about it turning into a permanent job, he informed me they fire everyone in January, after the busy season, which starts in September.  In the meantime, a permanent job rolled in, so I informed the staffing agency that I would not be showing up.  They did not take it well.  The owner of the staffing agency called my emergency contacts--in the future just make these up if you work with a staffing agency, perhaps Paul Lennon and John McCartney, see if they're smart enough to catch the joke, probably not--and tried to panic them into thinking I was hurt.  If I remember correctly, the agency never even contacted me directly.  So, yes, these people suck.  That being said, if you're hard up enough, you may want to go with an agency.  They'll take a big cut out of your pay for a while, but, hey, you're not making anything if you're unemployed and not on benefits anyway.  For someone like me, who's being picky at the moment (and I still find myself interviewing for awful jobs), I avoid them entirely.  If other companies were run better, staffing agencies wouldn't even exist to leave their own trail of slime and incompetence over the hiring process, but that's the world we live in.

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