by Ted Sherman

Created on: January 21, 2008

My lifelong attitude about employment agencies has been a very negative one. It isn't just that I picture them as offices full of cynical, money-grabbing characters who look at people seeking jobs the same way butchers look at their wares. To them the job market is just a meat market.

My prejudices were formed during employment agency experiences throughout my 40 plus years in the working world. Early on it was when I was looking for jobs, and later when I was a boss looking for employees. I found most agencies offered all kinds of promises, but seldom come through with any of them. Their efforts ... more like interference ... often just were wastes of time and money. That's just my opinion, and I found in almost all cases of job seeking, whether I was on the applicant side of the table or the employer's, each individual's ambition, research, initiative and just plain guts were much more effective. When they got up and got out to make their own opportunities, employment agencies were totally unnecessary.

Of course, all of my experiences happened long before the internet, and in addition to all the technical advances since, I suspect much of the time an applicant must spend pounding the pavement has been eliminated. Apple One's publicity encourages the use of the internet, and offers a long list of services for both the job applicant and the employer. Unlike most agencies I dealt with in my working years, AppleOne advertises that for all job applicants it places, only the employer pays the fees.

I remember one unpleasant situation where I, just out of the service, signed up with an agency where the applicant pays. At the same time, I was pounding the pavement looking for jobs on my own, and I succeeded getting one. I got a bill for $200 from the agency, claiming they also had the job listed, but they had never contacted me about it, so I owed them the fee. I had to fight them, but I never paid it. I always felt sorry later when I was hiring new employees who had to pay agency fees, and knew they could have avoided it by doing more research in the want ads and would've found the job on their own.

AppleOne, which has no affiliation with Apple Computers, started as a dinky little one-man agency with $3,500 in assets in 1964 by Bernard Howroyd. It claims today to be the largest privately-held, multi-service employment service in the world. That may not be likely, because AppleOne confines its business to the US and Canada. The corporation has several hundred offices

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