I’ve talked about some, just a few, of the evils of the modern common structure of “recruiting” companies and how it was mandated by misguided tax laws here.
Briefly, they do not recruit.
Far from trying to persuade anyone to take a position, they expect the candidates to do most of the work in hopes of getting employed and be grateful for anything they receive. The only “services” that these companies provide are often-unintelligible phone calls from overseas call centers, mass untargeted emailings, and the printing of payroll checks while skimming considerable percentages off the top for every single hour worked and the entire duration of the “employment”. They are now lazy and disinterested in providing any real service that many of these companies make absolutely no effort to match candidates with positions. If you are experienced in the IT field you are likely to receive constant emails and phone calls for positions anywhere in the US with complete disregard for where you live or are interested in living, and having nothing at all to do with your field, your skills and experiences. These “recruiters” simply do not care about any of that. That would require some knowledge of the field, and they have none. Sort yourselves out.
This system perpetuates itself because it provides skilled workers to large corporations and, very importantly, large government agencies, workers who receive few benefits and less respect in the workplace while often being the only people in that workplace who actually add value. It depends on a steady influx of underpaid workers from overseas, many desperate to get a toe-hold in the US and willing to take any work offered.
This has been going on for several decades, and pretty much all aspects of it, the lack of respect for the actual workers and disregard for their rights and the percentage of money spent on them that vanishes into “overhead” absorbed by entities that provide no added value have gotten steadily worse over that entire period, to the point where now the tech “booms” and prosperity of the nineteen-nineties are completely unimaginable and regarded as at least semi-mythical.
Now it looks like this unsupportable structure is finally beginning to fall apart, and, of course, it is doing so by stiffing the workers. If something fails, you can’t expect any of the other entities to take a hit, can you?
Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, the fissure that is opening up at the moment seems to be in Australia, where the IT employment situation sound very much like that in the US:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/05/03/2019240/it-contractors-in-australia-are-not-being-paid-due-to-dispute-with-payroll-service (slashdot.org)
Unpaid tech contractor: ‘I have to support my family. I have no money for medicines’ (theregister.co.uk)
Having worked in this field for a very long time, I can with almost complete confidence predict that this is just the very beginning of this sort of problem unless the situation, long widely accepted as the unchallenged status quo, is reformed very quickly… and that seems very unlikely.
– Robert the Wombat