The most respected recruiter in London

[cykophysh39]

Rubbish, if you're good at what you do, your clients can find you. Through recommendations of other technical people, though LinkedIn or googling, or whatever.

Maybe clients don't do enough of that right now, but if there were no agents, they would be forced to. And they would get better results.

No place for agents at all.

This may be true! but it takes time to clock up enough contacts for this to happen. Eventually this does happen though. Sites like LinkedIn have become nothing more than the new "jobserve" I get more hits to my page from Agents than I do any other. The reality of the situation is that most potential hiring managers don't bother looking for potential candidates by themselves, due to time restraints. They usually farm this task out to HR, who in turn farm it out to Agents. I must admit it that I have done this in the past, when I've need people, I usually make the calls to my contact book, and once I've confirmed everyone thats worth taking on, are in contract due to the fact that they are good at what they do, I end up bringing in an agent. This is pure and simply because I don't want to spending time to trawl linkedin for potential's. I'd happily leave that to an agent.

The fact is that most people have a "vanilla" linked in profiles, all claiming to be "highly motivated", "hard working" , "highly experienced" blah blah blah, in order to sort any wheat from the chaff, would take me an inordinate amount of time, phoning, emailing yada yada. I'd just as well farm this out to recruiters, To get me the "top 10 available" on the market I do an internal sift to 3/5 that I would like to interview, and pick 1 from that.

That my friend is the reality of it. Most hiring managers don't know that you're the potential "expert" in your niche, they won't know you as the go to go, majority of the time they are blissfully unaware of your existence.

I view agents, as one of the tools in my marketing department. They are just one of the resources I use to get work. I don't spend too much time worrying about if they are evil or not, frankly I've got other things to worry about.