As a Project Manager who has been in the contract market for a long time, with a CV full of blue chip clients, I get regular calls from ‘Recruitment Consultants’. I am finding that more and more I am being offered roles as an engineer, technical help desk support, sales, more often than not on a remarkably low salaried permanent basis, and this is beginning to get my goat now.   I am seriously getting the needle with agents who call themselves ‘consultants’, who are going to take anything between 10 and 50pct of the money offered by the client, but who do little more than scan C.V.’s which are sent to them and do word searches, then have the affront to offer me jobs that have nothing to do with what I do, and insist that it’s a ‘fantastic opportunity’.   How many times have you been asked to re-write your C.V. to suit the clients needs better? i.e. we cannot see the word Citrix in your CV enough times.   Apparently, it would appear that the majority of HR departments do exactly the same, scan and word search, looking for the key words that fit the job spec, which was probably written by someone that doesn’t even know what the candidate is really going to do.    It would appear that virtually no-one reads a C.V. anymore. But hang on…. Isn’t that your job, isn’t that what a recruitment consultant is supposed to do, I mean, what do you expect to do for your money?   I can still remember the days of being able to call into a recruitment agents office, sit down with a consultant, get some assistance on how best to write your C.V., and that consultant would work on your behalf to find the best suited role for you, and you would build a relationship with that consultant, do more than one contract assignment with them, and get to know them as friends as well as agents.  They were just that.  Your Agent.   Those days alas are now long gone, the world of recruitment is now like so many other things, just electronic mass market sales. First come first served, best electronic fit based on key word matching.  Turnover not service.   Just another part of our world where quantity not quality seems to be the driving factor, profits not people, and with tools such as iProfile, the contractor who does not fit exactly, no matter how good they are, no longer stands a chance.