I am residing in germany, working as an electric engineer for hardware, embedded firmware and PLD design in germany, austria and switzerland and more and more suffer from the aggressive agency battle taking place here!
Within less than 3 years, it happend nearly 10 times now, that I could not accept a contract or had been blocked out, because one and the same project has been anounced to me three or four times from different agencies.
It is more or less always the same procedure: One of those famous "key account managers" (nowadays mostly blonde ladies, aged 25 and having studied something like economics) give my a call and anounce a project with a quit high rate. After accepting their pre contract, which allowes me only to work for them, I hear nothing again for a week while they obviuosly try to get somebody else in at the customers. In only around a third of the cases they finally come back to me, because they failed, or the customer did not like the others, which are cheaper than me or maybe did not have the same knowledge.
Because I cannot sit and wait, I parallely negotiate other opportunities but since agencies always modify the explanation , it is hard for me to distinguish the offers and discover identical positions.
Finally the fact, that there are not enough enginers in germany but too many agencies makes it even worse for me than it used to be in times, where there were more engineers avaliable at the same time for a project and this "blocking out the expensive guy" would not work.
Obviously the only action of the agencies currently is, to block out higher educated people with higher rates, where they cannot earn enough.
As said at the beginning, there had been so many collisions recently, that I concentrated on positions, which were offered by one agency only, which then lead to the fact, that I had to work in switzerland to shun that all.
I wonder if you experice the same in the UK.
Within less than 3 years, it happend nearly 10 times now, that I could not accept a contract or had been blocked out, because one and the same project has been anounced to me three or four times from different agencies.
It is more or less always the same procedure: One of those famous "key account managers" (nowadays mostly blonde ladies, aged 25 and having studied something like economics) give my a call and anounce a project with a quit high rate. After accepting their pre contract, which allowes me only to work for them, I hear nothing again for a week while they obviuosly try to get somebody else in at the customers. In only around a third of the cases they finally come back to me, because they failed, or the customer did not like the others, which are cheaper than me or maybe did not have the same knowledge.
Because I cannot sit and wait, I parallely negotiate other opportunities but since agencies always modify the explanation , it is hard for me to distinguish the offers and discover identical positions.
Finally the fact, that there are not enough enginers in germany but too many agencies makes it even worse for me than it used to be in times, where there were more engineers avaliable at the same time for a project and this "blocking out the expensive guy" would not work.
Obviously the only action of the agencies currently is, to block out higher educated people with higher rates, where they cannot earn enough.
As said at the beginning, there had been so many collisions recently, that I concentrated on positions, which were offered by one agency only, which then lead to the fact, that I had to work in switzerland to shun that all.
I wonder if you experice the same in the UK.
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