Fancy a new career for 2007? Computer says no

Business is booming for recruitment agencies which choose candidates for jobs online. But, Tessa Mayes discovers, this crude tick-box process is dumbing down the job market 1 t has become a cliché of modern political rhetoric and social commentary to declare that the typical 21st-century worker will have not one but several careers. Those in the job market are warned that they will have to be ever more versatile and nimble and be prepared, in the government's phrase, to undertake 'lifelong learning'. The age of the job for life is certainly over. In its place, today's workers face a lifetime of job mobility, shortto medium-term employment and personal risk-taking.

If only this buccaneering spirit operated throughout the system. Between prospective employees and their next job now stands a bleak wall of recruiters, who are positively risk-averse. While applicants are told that they must think creatively and laterally, today's recruitment agencies and 'embedded' or outsourced Human Resources (HR) departments are tending more and more to rely on a deadening lick-box' strategy for hiring staff.

'Transferable skills are not classed as a plus,' according to one friend who has spent the last two years doing short-term contract management work for health and rail companies. 'Recruiters seem to be playing safe. For example, if you haven't got experience of the restaurant business, then no matter how suited you are for the job in other ways you won't get a look in, even though high-flying innovators are exactly the kind of people who can apply their talents to most businesses. I get big, fat rejection letters from recruiters. Usually I win a contract by meeting the boss and impressing them.' Having cut out the middleman, she now earns £100,000 a year.

To investigate the problem, I call up some of the leading 'featured recruiters' on the Financial Times website. As an experienced journalist (Panorama, Cutting Edge, the Sunday Times, co-presenter of a show with Sacha Baron Cohen) with knowledge of the voluntary sector, I can reasonably claim to have 'transferable' communication and management skills that could be adapted for work in, say, public relations or marketing.

Badenoch and Clark is an agency that specialises in finance, banking, law and the public sector. True, I have no legal background, but their website advertises jobs in marketing and research for which I would expect to be at least considered.

Not so. A friendly recruiter tells me that the marketing department doesn't 'quite touch on PR'. He offers to pass my details on to a friend of his that runs a PR agency. But we haven't even discussed my CV yet. Surely my experience counts for something? Now he's flustered: 'In terms of . . . Christ, I'm just trying to think what that could cross over into . . . I'm not sure how to advise you on that, I'm afraid.' I don't hear from him again.

The next day I decide to join the 29 per cent of people who look for jobs online, according to the British Market Research Bureau. The trouble is only 6 per cent of the 25,000 people they surveyed actually found a position this way. And here, it emerges, is the reason why: in 'e-recruitment' — so superficially appealing — agencies don't always read your CV, but use search tools with a limited range of key words to match you with jobs. So as recruitment goes high-tech, it also dumbs down.

I spend several hours clicking the details on forms and sending my CV to the first five agencies that come up on a Google search — Reed, Agency Central, Manpower, Monster and Media Recruitment. Not one calls me back. I speak to a recruiter at Reed. She tells me that the reason I haven't heard anything from them is that my CV hasn't been 'flagged up'.

My 'ticked boxes' presumably didn't make an exact match with employers' tickbox' requirements. Among the boxes I ticked were 'PR Manager', '05,000' salary and 'work in London'. Admittedly, my work experience to date doesn't include PR. But surely out of the 5,440 jobs listed under PR and Marketing somebody at Reed could see that my CV might just, conceivably, be worth a second look?

'I'm not a careers officer,' warns the woman from Reed, before advising me to 'emphasise' my skills and interests on my CV. I can apply online for particular jobs sent via their 'job alert' emails. But with this system I'll be stuck in lick-box' hell, just another online form among thousands being sent off for a particular job.

Isn't it easier for me to apply to companies direct without using the agency, I ask? 'Our employers use us because we filter out the best people for their roles and candidates like yourself will use us so we find the best jobs for them,' she replies.

To decode: the only real winner is the recruiter, who is sent a torrent of CVs, sifted within nano-seconds, recommends a candidate or candidates to the employer and then pockets a commission. The employer fills the vacancy. But — so faceless has the e-selection process become — the chance of an imaginative choice, based on a hunch or a bit of lateral thinking, is negligible.

Tom Hadley, spokesman for the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) which represents the UK recruitment industry, agrees that there is a problem. 'Professional recruiters pride themselves on applying the brief from an employer', he says, and that is frequently 'too prescriptive'. Meanwhile, burgeoning fear of discrimination law and applicants' litigiousness compounds the problem and result in employers taking fewer and fewer risks with their recruitment strategy. The result: a bonanza for the agencies. Michael Page Recruitments, for example, recently announced a rise in gross profits of 32.4 per cent in the final quarter of 2006, taking its annual gross profit for the year to £348.7 million Imaginative employers see the agencies as a positive obstacle to finding employees with flair and entrepreneurial potential. For Ian Howlett, the 39-year-old managing director of web development company Interesource, recruitment agencies are a 'last resort'. He gets about five calls a day from agencies trying to win business. 'The majority don't understand the skills of the people I'm looking for,' he says. As a result, when the company wanted a creative project manager, they asked around at the office. Somebody who turned out to be 'open, enthusiastic, and her personality fitted with the company' was recommended by a director's friend's sister. Are agencies really that bad? 'Recruitment agents are basically salesmen looking for their 15 per cent commission,' replies Howlett. 'Sometimes you think, "What have they done for that?"

The next day I get an instant job offer by email. I'm not sure how they got my address, but a company in Greece wants me and I don't even need 'specific knowledge'. The trouble is the offer reads more like a career in money-laundering. I 'receive payments' from clients into my personal bank account. Then I transfer the money to the company's brokers abroad. I press 'delete'.

Finally, I call up a major agency whose mission statement is: 'We listen to you and we endeavour to find you the job you want.' They sound like friendly people, I think. A nice man from Nitor Recruitment, a company that specialises in financial recruitment such as work in tax, accountancy, hedge funds and brokers and traders, refreshingly gets straight to the point.

'Have you had enough of the media?' Yes. So far, so good.

'Finance is very employerrather than employee-driven,' he warns. `Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when a client asks me to go and find someone they give me strict criteria. . . . Finance is about how much money you can bring with you when you go there. As far as getting you out of one profession and into another, we're probably not the company for you.' Uh-oh.

I fall silent. 'Sales skills can be transferable to financial products,' he offers. I get hopeful. 'I can semi-talk people round to looking at the CV of somebody with an economics degree,' he adds. My heart sinks. Mine is in philosophy and politics.

By now, I'm pleading. Couldn't I use my skills to communicate with clients and write reports? `I'd love to help you,' he says sweetly. 'You seem like a nice girl, et cetera, but my hands are tied.'

He suggests we meet up for a beer. 'I just want loads more money,' I say, a last desperate bid to appeal to his core instincts.

Pause. I am on to something. 'Have you thought of a job in recruitment?' he says.