If the ad does not list the employer, it is known as a "blind" ad. Companies may list a blind ad for several reasons. They may do it to avoid communicating their needs and plans to their competition. Such listings may indicate a shift in the company's plans or a gap in the services the company currently has to offer, either of which might give an advantage to a competitor, if they knew of it. An organization may list a blind ad to have evidence for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that they advertised a position and were willing to consider any applicant. Or a company may simply use a blind ad to avoid excessive paperwork in replying to all applicants and thus minimize the amount of time spent on filling a specific position. Only the most qualified applicants would be contacted.
There are both public and private employment agencies. Public agencies, such as the state employment service, list openings from the government as well as other organizations in the community.
Private agencies are businesses established for the purpose of earning a profit from referral commissions paid to the agency by either the job hunter or the hiring employer. When the fee is paid by the job hunter, the agency usually agrees to assist in preparing the job hunter for finding a job. But only rarely do such agencies provide career counseling for the job hunter and cover many of the topics found in this book. For entry-level positions, such an arrangement is usually disadvantageous, since you would be paying someone else to do what most organizations expect you to be able to do on your own, that is, show the initiative and self-confidence to learn and apply the skills of job hunting on your own.
A greater number of employment agencies earn their money by having employers pay a fee for finding a person to fill a vacant position. The company will list an opening exclusively with an employment agency, and if the agency refers a candidate who is eventually hired, the agency receives a certain percentage (ten to thirty percent) of the individual's annual starting salary. The agency conducts no career counseling, although some preparation for interviews is typically given to the job hunter. Even in such an arrangement, there may be clauses indicating that the individual must pay a fee if for some reason the employer does not pay the fee, or if the individual leaves the organization within the first year of employment. This type of agency tends to favor those job hunters who have specific employment skills that are in high demand, such as secretarial, computer programming, engineering, or other technical skills.
Employment agencies of this type are working for the employer. In this regard, their energies are directed toward filling the positions that they have been given, not toward finding a position for a candidate who has come to them. With this in mind, the job hunter should not place too much reliance on getting a position through an agency.
Certain cautions should be observed if you do intend to work with an employment agency,
- As already mentioned, be careful of exactly what your contract covers.
- Also watch out for being persuaded to take a position in which you are really not interested simply because that is what the agency has available.
- A final caution about employment agencies is that some have been known to advertise positions that do not in fact exist in order to attract you to their service. Such a questionable practice may also be used to obtain resumes of individuals that might then be shown to companies to generate new business for the agency.
Personnel Departments
As an organization grows, the level of hiring activity becomes large enough to make it worthwhile to have a function within the company that is devoted specifically to employment activities. This is the personnel or human resource function. Personnel is a staff function which assists management in publicizing openings and screening and selecting applicants. They typically screen and present the best five or so applicants for each position to the hiring manager for evaluation and ultimate selection.
Personnel can influence a hiring decision and quite easily screen out applicants whom they deem to be inappropriate, but the personnel representative rarely makes the ultimate hiring decision.
There are several limitations that a job hunter might have in dealing with personnel departments. One of these is that personnel is often unaware of future employment needs that management might have. For ex ample, a manager might have a customer relations problem that is getting worse each month and costing the company an increasing amount of money in lost business. If the problem becomes serious enough, the potential amount of lost revenue might justify the hiring of an individual to work on the problem. Although the need might have been in the manager's mind for several months-or even years-personnel might not actually have been aware of the need until a specific request for hiring is made and approved. Conceivably, if the manager knows of an individual who is qualified and interested in such a position, that person is likely to have an inside track to the job.
A second limitation of personnel as reported by many job hunters is that they often do not know enough about the specific opening or the working environment of the position to give a candidate a complete picture of what the job entails.
