Recruitment Consultants Fatal Meetings

I want to explain how bad some Engineering and IT Recruitment consultants are in meetings. Consultants that didn’t understand what budget constraints or competition were, Recruiters who thought the acronym PSL stood for Pretty Stupid List (Preferred Suppliers List) and thought that HR were really to calculate pensions, pay rises and pay slips were in for a shock during the last recesion. It was during this period that I learned that Tender wasn’t just a way of having your meat, but also a way of competitively bidding for work!

One memorable meeting I was invited to was for the London Underground. The London Underground used to dedicate its budget depending on length of track, but decided to change to the routes people took and its usage. It therefore needed a new software system to track peoples travel and calculate which lines were used. A lot of code on an old system, just what we needed as when new systems are introduced, the work would be likely to be shifted to India.

I was met in an office, just outside Liverpool Street Station, it was actually used in a film shot for Mission Impossible, by the IT Manager. He was extremely friendly, and decided to give me a tour of his entire department. I met every programmer and every manager, I was shown every other department too. Human Resources were extremely friendly, which should have made me suspicious, but I just figured that maybe they needed our service. After about 3 hours of walking around, talking to people and generally feeling very welcome, the meeting ended. I was invited to use “the facilities” before I left, I answered I was fine thank you. The IT Manager suggested that I might want to use the toilet, I said, No really I am good. The IT Manager then just said “Oh for god sake go to the bathroom and stop embarrassing yourself!” I went to the bathroom to find to my horror that my trousers were undone. Worse than that, I wsa waring boxer shorts with no buttons, so all was on display, and to make things even more humiliating, it was November in a Victorian building with little heating, so I did not demonstrate my best moments. I never did speak again to London Undergound, I was just too embarrassed. I couldn’t phone them again, I certainly never met them again, and fortunately just after moved recruitment sector so never had to explain to my boss why.

Some meetings involved copious quantities of Alcohol, which in recruitment you became used to quite rapidly, unfortunately some people became quite attached and indeed fell in love with it. I remember one particular meeting with an investment bank, where a colleague of mine, lets call her Mary, was famous for her relationship with wine. To give a picture of Mary, she was an ex-holiday representative, who went to work for IBM. Don’t forget IBM means I’ve Been Married and whilst working there she got married and divorced. She decided to have a life change, moved to London and went into recruitment. I remember that after her interview we all went down the pub for a beer to welcome her. Our boss bought the beers and whilst toasting her, her knickers fell down around her ankles. She was very game, she carried on talking and slowly removed them by stepping out of them. She picked them up, stuffed them in her handbag and acted as if nothing happened. The pub was very quiet at this point, but she was particularly popular with some of our less mature male employees.

Mary is best known though for a meeting with a very influential client, who had come over from the US for a banking meeting and was responsible for all the Money Laundering controls in the UK. We were at the bottle of port stage of the meal, when Mary decided she needed a cigarette (or as a colleague would call it “an oily”) rather than excusing herself and going outside to “make a call”, she slipped underneath the table and lit up. The client and I just looked at each other and cracked up laughing. After finishing her cigarette with an audible sigh, Mary re surfaced and asked the obvious question of the client “so what does a handsome man like you do when you are on our own in London at night?”. It was then that I ordered her a taxi.