I read Nick Halstead’s “10 Reasons Why I hate Recruitment Agents” with interest.

I would like to add two more reasons, that I have personally experienced:

1. Asking me to come meet them
This is my favourite one. Nick wrote about agents asking to come meet him. I can see why they try to push for a meeting, this makes competitive sense.
But how about that recruiter who asked me to visit their office so that I could talk to their candidates? What makes them think that, on top of having to deal with their unsolicited phone calls, I would like to maximize the waste of time by driving to their damn office to let them bludgeon me with bogus resumes and run unprepared interviews with deer-in-the-headlights candidates? This beggars reason.

2. They also lie to the job applicants
In case you had any doubt about this, it happens. I’ve been there myself. I went to an interview with a big banking organization; I had only agreed to this interview after several weeks of them chasing me (I was already happily employed) and was supposed to be interviewed for a job as a team lead. It took me a solid 10 minutes of awkward q&a with the company recruiter to realize that they had basically decided to see if they could instead sell me as a junior programmer. Again, I have no idea whatsoever what it is that they were trying to achieve.
So, that’s my experience. Deplorably, it is a situation that has also happened to me when interviewing people, only to realize that they had basically been lied to regarding the position offered.

These two reasons, put together, lead me to think that rather than standard scum, these people are fiercely deluded.