"And it's a FFS from me..."

A friend of my eldest os a recruitment consultant. She told me recently that there are very few real job on the books of the recruiters. They advertise non-existent jobs to harvest CVs and to get lists of refereees that they will use as sales contacts. They pretend to callers that jobs exist, set impossible deadlines, ask candidates when they are free for interview then set interviews when the candidate can't attend and they simply lie through their teeth and say the job was taken.

Nice people, not.

Send it in anyway, IME employers don't turn away good applicants when shortlisting.

The recruitment consultant I dealt with at the agency I drove for said the same. They were given recruitment targets to meet even though there was sod all work.

That'll be your average bodyshop agency with the morals of a lobotomised junkyard dog then. Nothing to see here, move along...

Pretty much every EKS I know has a short (or very short) list of agencies that they're willing to do business with because there are so many bad ones out there.

And from the perspective of someone who is trying to help in hiring a contractor or two right at this moment, there are an awful lot of candidates out there whose CVs appear to match someone else's skill set.

I find it a good indicator as to how many unsolicited calls I get for decent contracts and the fact that it's recently picked up suggests that there are jobs out there, but there are also an awful lot of people chasing said contracts.

It's an online application, so it isn't possible. What winds me up is that it's the sort of sloppy use of language that would have been jumped on by any of my uni lecturers.

Welcome to the real world :). After a few years you'll be amazed that

Send it in anyway, you never know! Just finished uni?

Ain't that the truth.... :o(

Nah, finished last year, went straight into a job, got made redundant, taken back on as a temp at the same place, and now work's drying up again.