Job Agents

Near the year-end, staff turnover in financial institutions is usually low as people are waiting for year-end bonus. Since compliance is a one of the professions with high demand, from time to time compliance officers would receive cold calls from job agents.

In general, I think the professionalism of HK job agents is deteriorating in recent years. There were some bad experiences in my memory, which make me challenge the agents' competency and even integrity. I even think their problems are similar to those of investment professionals, such as:

Mis-selling

The agents fail to do any homework about the candidate's profile and then recommend an inappropriate job. This wastes the time of both the candidate and the prospective employer. As compliance is still young profession, many agents do not really understand its nature and function. As a result, they can only read out the job description to the candidate without performing any suitability assessment. Once a time I sent my CV (which clearly indicates my career history of securities compliance) to an agent and eventually he referred a job of "physical security" to me! Perhaps he didn't differentiate "securities" from "security".

Dissemination of false information

Some agents pretend to have job offers from some large institutions (actually such offers do not exist) and use such false information to solicit CV from candidates. Then they use the CV for "hawking" before the employers, without getting the candidates' consent. This is very unethical.

Confidentiality

There are too many "big mouth" agents in the society. They don't respect the confidentiality of the candidates by disclosing their information to outsiders on a "no need to know" basis. Sometimes they fail to handle the confidential information with prudence. I had once received an email from an agent, which was actually for the attention of another candidate but wrongly sent to my email address. I was highly concerned whether any email to me would be sent by her to a third party.

Underselling

When publishing the salary surveys, the agency firms tend to overstate the market prices to attract the job seekers. When actually bargaining a job from a prospective employer, they often undersell the candidate in order to increase the success rate. Some agents even attempt to fool the candidate. For example, they may say you are unreasonable to ask for a 20% increase in monthly salary, but ignoring the fact that the new employer is paying 12-month fixed salary while your existing one is paying 13-month.

While the malpractices of property agents and investment professionals are highly regulated, why are the job agents un-regulated or at least under-regulated? Now I can only rely on self-protection measures, including: (a) trust only agents referred by my friends and reject all cold-calling agents; and (b) black-list all known agents who are not acting professionally. Of course, I have also established a long term relationship with a few good agents and feel comfortable to make referral of candidates to them.