SINGAPORE: Are recruiters becoming less professional these days? A jobseeker recently raised this concern online after encountering several recruiters who, according to him, behaved in ways that made them seem “like scammers.”
In a post on the r/SingaporeRaw forum, the jobseeker said the way recruiters communicate with candidates now feels very different from how it used to be. In the past, he recalled that recruiters would usually start conversations with a proper greeting, introduce themselves clearly, and spell out the full name of the company they represented. Now, however, he claims some simply message him with something like “hey bro.”
He also said that some recruiters become unresponsive on WhatsApp even after contacting him first. According to him, when he replies and says, “Okay, we can talk now,” they sometimes stop replying altogether.
“After being unresponsive, I even have to ask them again, ‘so when are you available to speak?’” he wrote.
The jobseeker also recounted an experience where a recruiter told him that they had supposedly arranged for the role to include one day of working from home each week. Because of that assurance, he decided to attend the interview even though the office was located far from where he lives. However, when he arrived and spoke with the hiring manager, he was told that the recruiter had never mentioned anything about a work-from-home arrangement.
“I didn’t want this job in the first place but it was the 1 day of WFH that made me go down to the far place,” he wrote. “I wasted so much time travelling to and fro for nothing because of their miscommunication, or the agent lied to me about WFH.”
In addition, he said he has also encountered recruiters who insist on rephrasing and shortening the details listed on his resume.
“Those details are important, which is why I structured it that way for people in my field to understand,” he said. “If they shorten it too much, then to the hiring company it looks like I only know how to do a few things and have no other experience,” he wrote. “Many years ago, agents were not like this.”
“It’s rare to find a good recruiter.”
In the comments, many Singaporean Redditors said they agreed with the man’s observations. One wrote, “Most of them don’t bother whether you fit the requirements or not; they just spam everybody with the job and hope someone takes the bait and both the candidate and employer feel the interview is a waste of time as it’s not compatible. And these recruiters like to lie a lot in order to get people to go for interviews.”
They added, “The only advice I can give you is, once these recruiters give you the company name and job description, just search them up yourself to see whether they can do direct hire or not.”
Another wrote, “It’s rare to find a good recruiter. Best to keep in touch if you manage to find one.”
A third commented, “Expose the company. I also went through a 3rd party hiring company. I was dumb and I regret it.”
In other news, a jobseeker found herself in an awkward situation when an interviewer reportedly declined to consider her for a full-time administrative role paying S$2,600 per month, allegedly because she only holds a diploma.
Sharing her experience on the r/singaporejobs subreddit on Wednesday (Feb 11), the woman recalled, “I went for an interview. My resume clearly states that my highest education is a diploma, but only when I arrived did he open my resume for the first time. From his reaction, I’m quite sure he hadn’t read it at all, and he looked genuinely shocked that I’m a diploma holder.”
