One of the “delights” of moving to another country is the process of job hunting. And I use the term delights as a euphemism because in reality the whole process is really more like hell on earth. While I believe market economies are fairly efficient mechanisms by which skills are matched up with requirements, or at least more efficient than than the alternatives, it does not mean it is a process to savour.
Back in the UK, there are these things called recruitment agencies, which are best summarised as a contradiction of terms. Within the financial sector (or rather what is left of it) they do a sane job, but everywhere else they do more damage than good. There have been cases where I have found the same job description in multiple places, and as it turned out it had been cut-n-pasted from the company’s own careers website. There are some agencies that actually have working relations with their clients, but in the vast majority of cases all that an agency is really doing is letting you know names of companies. The nasty bit is how agencies try to muscle in on the whole recruitment process, at the expense of just about everyone else, and this is most noticeable when you try to use Google to search for jobs. Agencies flood just about every job listing site with adverts, to the extent that it is common for multiple adverts to end up being for the same job. 95% of internet job listing sites are a waste of time looking at. In New Zealand it is not quite as bad as the UK, but it is sufficiently bad for me to conclude that Seek is a complete waste of time, and TradeMe is only marginally better.
While placement fees in New Zealand are not quite as high as the 30% of starting salary companies get charged in the UK, there is a common practice in New Zealand that I think is banned in most of Europe: charging the employees. The worst one I came across was one that wanted four weeks gross salary, upfront of actually starting the job, and required the would-be-employees to keep this arrangement secret. As soon as I touched down in Auckland I suspected from the start that local agencies would be asking for trouble, and I was right.