On any given job you apply for, your odds of landing the role are pretty low. Even for a good candidate, maybe one in every 7 or 8 applications leads to interviews, one in every 15 or 20 to a job offer.
That makes for a lot of wasted effort and frustration.
It's probably a safe bet that over half of these roles are being advertised by recruitment agencies. Different agencies, but we all kind of look the same to candidates. As such recruitment agencies become the common factor in people's frustration during the job hunt.
People don't though realise their application is in fact far more likely to disappear down a black hole when they apply direct, as it's a rarity to apply multiple times with the same organisation, and as a result they don't see the pattern.
My wife was in the job market recently, and she kept a close track of responses for direct and via agency. She definitely got faster response via Agency (and by response I mean a phone call, not a generic auto-response). It was an interesting exercise. Yes, some applications did go into the black hole for some agency roles, but far less than with direct.
So are you guilty bundling all agencies into one basket?
