It's been one of those weeks.

Dec 29, 2006

When this job began, there were all kinds of communication snafus with the recruiting agency:

• Their on-site rep didn't accurately communicate my start date to the main office — hence the recruiter, the recruiter's boss, the account manager for this company, the recruitment agency's HR department, and myself all thought that my start date was a week earlier than what it actually was. This meant that I effectively gave up a week's worth of income.
• The recruiting agency never did send my startup package, which would have had all the documentation about benefits, the payroll schedule, closures, and so forth. I had to aggressively pester them to get my health-benefit enrollment information emailed to me.
• When I discussed coming down to fill out the health-benefit enrollment forms, the HR rep told me not to come down...because everything was done on-line, and she wouldn't know how to do it any other way.
• When I went through the online enrollment process and got to the final page, I had to print out, sign, and fax in a form. Remembering how they had complained about the poor quality of incoming faxes when I originally faxed over my employment documents, I resolved to hand-deliver the signed form. When I got there on the 26th, the building was completely locked. When I came again on the 27th and 28th, the building was unlocked and other businesses were open, but the recruiting agency's door was locked tight.
• Meanwhile, beginning on the 27th, I tried faxing the document to the number listed on the benefits-enrollment form. The line rang and rang, but nothing ever picked up: no fax machine, no person, no voice mailbox, nothing.
• I've tried calling them three times today — ostensibly a workday — and no one has answered. I never received any information about the agency being closed this week...so shouldn't someone be there to answer the goddamn phone?

People. When you run a recruiting agency (or any kind of employment agency) you are essentially providing a service: you match candidates and job skills up with available jobs, then you act as the payroll and benefits provider for those job-skill holders (and then turn around and bill the companies ten times the price at least. You have to be excellent at communications. And it's not like that's impossible: you can send emails to keep your employees informed, give them and yourself a record of what was communicated, and don't have to play phone-tag trying to catch all the employees at home. Communication is even more important around the holidays, when business closures and employee vacations (and the unfortunate illnesses) can make things even more...aherm...fun than usual.

So what's so impossible here, hm?!??!?? Why can these people not communicate?

Incompetence. Rank incompetence.

L-users.

Keywords: | communication |
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