I get a lot of calls during the week from recruitment agencies. It's one of the more annoying things about updating your CV on Monster that for the next month or so you get phonecall after phonecall from soulless recruitment agencies doing anything to get you to take a job. Much like the Job Center really. Yesterday was no different...

I answer to phone to a particularly cheery fellow.He's very polite and courteous and we exchange the usual niceties I extend to most of these people in the slim hope they might actually find me a well paying job with a company that aren't full of total cunts. He starts telling me about the perfect role he has for me.

"It's just down the road from you really on the far side of Blackpool, 15 minutes drive at most.." he starts with. He goes on to describe the job; ASP .NET, C#, XML, SQL. All the things I've been working on lately. Awesome I think. He says he has to check some things with the client before he can confirm he's going to put my CV in, mainly my salary expectations are a little high for what they're offering, but he'll call me back shortly.

And unlike most of the bastards that ring me, he actually does. He says the client will pay more for the "right" candidate as they need someone ASAP and it would be my job to sell myself in the interview. I'm currently working for myself so I can interview right away and they want to see me tomorrow (today) at 11am. Great I think, until they tell me the client...

"They're called Web Developer X and blah blah blah blah blah..."

I stopped him mid-sale. Without giving the names of my previous employers, Web Developer X just happens to be the people I handed my work over to when I quit my previous job. The company I worked for used these guys for subcontracting the web systems I developed and prettying them up. After I quit it was going to be up to them to take over my role full time and continue my legacy. I would have been interviewing for my old job back!

I explained to the leech why I had no interest in the roll but that wasn't good enough for him. His money driven mind couldn't grasp why I didn't want to take a role that ticked all the boxes of my skill set and was exactly the same base salary expectation I'd specified at the lower end of that spectrum.

"It's because it IS my old job..." I told him. I in fact told him this three times. He awkwardly ended the phonecall mumbling about his supervisor like his CPU had just attempted to divide by zero. I put the phone down and proceeded to piss my sides and explained to the missus what had just happened.

But this wasn't the end of it! About 10 minutes later, presumably after a system reboot, his supervisor gives me a call to clarify why I didn't want to interview for this "excellent opportunity". Even she wasn't taking no for an answer...

"Well what if we could get you the same salary that you were on at My Old Company?"

Seriously... she actually said that to me. Why in the living fuck would I want to go back to a job I quit on the same base salary to do exactly the same job that I now know they can't cope with so they're having to pay a recruitment agency to find someone gullible and desperate to do for the pittance I was earning?? This is the point I was making to her but she wasn't getting that although there were two names, it was effectively my old job back with my ex-employer...

Ironically though, as you do with all recruiters, I told them I was earning 6k more than I actually was so the "same" wages are in fact a pretty substantial pay rise. When I left the company, I told them about my new role and the 7k pay rise I would be getting from it. They turned around and told me they couldn't afford to match it.

It would seem that my job was not only worth the money I was asking for, it was worth paying between 10 and 25% of my yearly salary to find someone with my exact same skills as they already had tried and tested for nearly 2 and a half years. In that time, they had also never given me a single salary based pay rise, instead bribing me to stay with cheap PCs and shit I didn't really need, so were even paying me less and less as the years went by...

Karma... you've got to love it! :)

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