Just last month I had a guy contact me though my Link-In profile. His company provides individuals to other companies as a sub-contractor. I got a nice 14% pay raise out of it.
As for the OP, that sort of lying about jobs used to be really common.
Back in the mid 90’s I was hired as “project leader” for an insurance company. My first day on the job, introduced myself to someone and he said “Another one? I was hired for that position. So was he. And that guy over there. I think you’re #6 now. Sorry, but we’re all just programmers here.”
I was there about two months. One of the most disorganized places I’d ever been.
In actuarial circles, recruiters are SOP (not so much at entry levels, though).
It’s because it’s a small field, and there are not that many employees or employers, it’s hard to match them up without someone specializing in the field.
My cynical answer is that in this day and age, there simply isn’t enough “real work” to be done. So what has happened is that the economy has evolved into this massive services ecosystem of headhunters, salespeople, contractors, consultants, project managers, middle managers, agile coaches, thought leaders, SMEs and other bullshit roles so that people have stuff to do all day and an excuse to exchange money.
I also think the transient nature of the modern workforce, the relative ease that people can connect regarding potential job opportunities and this whole business culture of “believe and you can achieve / fake it til you make it” horse shit has made it overwhelmingly difficult to find competent people to fill a particular role.
That doesn’t make sense to me. If it’s such a small field with few employee and few employers, why is it so hard to match them up? Why can’t an actuary who works at MetLife call up the VP of Actuarial Services at AIG or Travelers directly and ask “are you hiring?”
Well firstly, the recruiters are hired by the firms, not by the prospective employees. So your question is really about why can’t a firm which needs an employee wait around until some actuary calls them up about a job. Obviously they wouldn’t want to do this. Their other alternative is to advertise, and some do, but it’s very difficult to economically reach actuaries, who tend to be a tiny percentage of people reached by your ads. It makes more sense to reach out to a recruiter whose job it is to be on top of these matters.
The same also applies to actuaries themselves, to an extent. Suppose there are 100 firms in your state which employ actuaries. Do you want to call up every single one (getting shunted from person to person until you get the guy who knows) or just call up a recruiter who knows exactly what’s out there? It’s a no-brainer.
Though I do know one guy who did what you suggest. My old boss began in the profession when he was in his 40s (he had been a professor of electrical engineering) and he found it tough to break in. (Entry level jobs are usually based on college recruiting and internships and don’t typically involve recruiters.) He did indeed call up firm after firm until he got hired.
Because today’s HR departments are clueless when it comes to evaluating technical skills.
In two cases I was rejected by HR…couldn’t get a response, much less an interview…then contacted by a headhunter and ended up filling the same job I’d been rejected from.
To get through the HR filters, you literally have to cut and paste from the job posting into your resume, including any typos (with corrections in case they caught it) Otherwise they cant figure out that knowing a dozen diverse programming languages means you will be fluent in languageoftheweek in less than a month.
The hiring manager probably gave HR the keywords to filter for. I’ve done that. Unfortunate, but since applying costs nothing (not even a stamp) any opening gets a flood of resumes 95% of which are totally irrelevant. Thus the filters.
And if you get 50 resumes of people who know the hot new language, why look at the 51st of someone who you’d have to trust to learn it - even if they can?