Temptation has a new name...Recruitment consultant

When all the other boys and girls ran away, a handful stayed and took the sweeties from the nice man in the mac. Screw ‘say no to strangers’; they wanted their sugar fix. Twenty years later, just as they were falling out of university, the nice man came back. This time he was disguised in someone else’s corporate identity and his sweets had been swapped for ‘£60k+ in your first year’. All they had to do was trade in their childhood dreams for a cash bonus.

Each year, thousands of graduates are kindly kicked like newborn foals, doe-eyed and idealistic into the big wide world. Worried by their debts, filled with terror at the realisation that their cherished subject is entirely useless, those who had never previously considered life beyond the compound appear to follow a series of prescribed routes. Sudden marriage or engagement to a significant, similarly directionless other is a popular choice, often followed by sudden-divorce, sudden-kids or sudden-flashes-of-resentment. Many choose to take a gap year from responsibility and find themselves in Goa, only to discover that their true selves are in Bromsgrove, cheerily meeting the IT demands of a multi-national pie seller. The fate of those left behind is determined arbitrarily by the dominant force in their personality and the level of panic induced by Saturday’s Guardian Jobs.

Too proud to sell double-glazing, too scared to sign-on, too ugly to lap-dance, they catch the word ‘consultant’. Already, the ears are pricking up at the idea that they could qualify for a job that might involve someone other than the barman asking their opinion. The word ‘recruitment’ acts as a keyword, accessing their subconscious fears and current preoccupation, triggering them into job-hunter overdrive, manically faxing CVs and cover letters to potential employers. With a starting salary greater than their age and the opportunity to be trained, who cares that they don’t know what the job is? By this point they have already visualised themselves indulging in important chitchat by the coffee machine, purifying themselves in the office gym and living the shiny lifestyle. Bite one of the apple.

Graduate training schemes ensure that once caught, there’s no wriggling free of the net. Paid to be trained, a novelty after paying someone to teach you for three years, they are tempted with a glimpse of the future. Even if the trainee realises that this is neither a creatively fulfilling nor intellectually stimulating career path to wander down mid way through a team-building exercise, it seems safer to follow through than to leap back into obscurity and under-achieving. At least they know more jargon than they did before, surely that’s useful for crosswords.

Interestingly, I logged onto a recruitment website and entered my details into a quick quiz job search. They promised to match me to my perfect career, so I truthfully answered each question, only to be told that I would do very well indeed as a web-designer (of which there is a shortage), teacher (of which there is also a shortage) or, to my surprise, IT recruitment consultant. Throw in life-insurance salesman and I could single-handedly fill the gap in the unpopular employment sector. Unbelievable, yet oddly flattering, having recently sabotaged my own attempts at entering the corporate life by turning up barefoot for the interview (on account of a last-minute revelation that I would rather receive payment from Mr Blair than a fuckwit in a suit that could contractually prevent me from swearing at strangers).

Interviewing recruitment consultants to find out more was a less than perky experience. Questions had to be answered; “Do you find your work satisfying?” As an opening line, this was fruitful. Their graduating dream realised at last, finally they could give a climactic “Yes”. “As I understand it, you earn commission by selling people to work for other people. Given that most graduates that approach you have little real understanding of the commercial sector, do you think that it is entirely ethical to persuade them to follow a defined career path that will render them inconsolable in a public lavatory in approximately five years time?” This elicited a more defensive response, impressively articulated with phrases such as ‘extensive research’, ‘detailed client profile’ and the long harmonious sound of the cut off line. As an alternative approach, “What did you want to be when you grew up?” was not entirely successful, as it was received by some with the implication that they were still waiting for this to happen. One slightly more garrulous recruitment consultant wistfully recounted tales of his former life spent reading the NME, dreaming of being a rock star, only to later admit that he found his work ‘as rewarding as he had ever hoped it would be’. Fair comment.

Maybe I was too harsh; maybe they deserve help, not scorn. Not the Samaritans, but a specially designed ‘recruitment consultancy outreach scheme’, aimed at de-programming through reversing the original training process. They could build bridges in teams from paper straws, before using them to gore each other’s eyes out, firing screwed-up performance charts at one another from a barrage of laptops and flip-boards. If this fails to work, they could be permitted to re-enter the profession on condition that they field all enquiries from recent grads with “Have you considered playing midday money with Richard and Judy for a few weeks?” Misguided loafers or irritating, money-grabbing bastards, they serve a corporate purpose, if not an existential necessity. Consenting to absorb a corporate identity is a choice, yet surely when this choice was made, any court in the land would uphold the argument that they were not necessarily of sound mind. Blame it all on the man with the sweeties.