The Staffing Agency Career Shuffle

The line between human with a pulse and excellent match for the job is often blurred when staffing agencies get involved in career decisions.  Most people don’t realize that when they are working with a staffing agency that the recruiter/account manager/account executive/whatever their title is gets paid by the company only if someone gets the job.  When they offer career advice and resume advice you had better know what YOU want.  You had also better be willing to stand your ground when they start offering you a ticket to the staffing agency career shuffle.  A really great example of this was the Y2K programming consulting jobs.  I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who became “programmers” for the Y2K bonanza.  After Y2K came Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Consulting.  Little do people realize, but the big staffing agencies have nationwide conference calls and trainings on how to push consultants and problems in need of solutions on corporate management.  When you are a big huge global staffing agency and have a big huge national sales and recruiting force you can create quite a BUZZ about the urgency of something.  It works a lot like the undertow at the beach - it sneaks up on you and then pulls you out to sea.

The message here is that you don’t want your career to get taken in a direction that isn’t natural for it just because you’ve got a staffing agency person who is motivated by their next commission.  The way to avoid this is by having a career plan.  It doesn’t matter if you get it from a book about parachutes or a mentor or from spending time talking to others close to you who have professional experience.

Over time this becomes increasingly more important and tactically more difficult.  Once you’ve played chutes and ladders with your career for a while your resume becomes a series of red flags waving in unison.  Worse, you don’t know where you should be professionally.  You start to think that you are every one of the jobs that you’ve ever been, but don’t know what you are really good at.  If you’ve felt this way then you should stop and spend some time contemplating where you have been and where you want to be.