As a resume writer, one of the most common complaints I hear is the treatment of clients at job agencies. The story below was sourced from The Guardian.

For the past two decades, millions of people who have found themselves unemployed have been sent to one of the country’s outsourced job agencies – whether they like it or not.

The government pays these companies and non-profits millions each year to assist – but also police – their clients’ job search efforts. They get more money for getting people into jobs or education.

The fact is that while there have been some successes, there are countless horror stories, where job agencies do nothing to help their clients find employment. They enrol them in useless training and in some cases, bully them.

The 150-page review, conducted by Boston Consulting Group, looked into the $1bn-a-year Disability Employment Services (DES) program and found the program was a cash cow for some providers, while results for jobseekers went backwards.

There is also the larger flagship JobActive program, whose myriad issues have also been covered by the Guardian.

The changing profile of Australia’s unemployed, meant more people were being sent to the DES program. This boosted agency coffers by more than 28% over the last few years.

Yet the likelihood of a DES participant finding a job declined by “around 12-14%”, the review found. The cost to the taxpayer of getting someone into six months of work, increased from $27,800 to $38,400 in only two years, with worse results.

Boston Consulting Group also found that providers were channelling more jobseekers into useless training courses. There was “limited evidence” jobseekers graduated from those courses or they were relevant.

Job agencies themselves told Boston Consulting Group that mutual obligations “did not, on balance, improve the likelihood of employment”. By chance, academic research came to a similar conclusion this week.

If you think job agencies are bad, spare a thought for some of the tricks that recruiters get up to.