Phantom roles haunt job seekers
Senior financial planners who are going for interviews for financial planning roles are finding the jobs advertised don’t exist.
Trevor Punnett, the managing director of eJobs Recruitment, said he has received complaints from job seekers who have applied for financial planning roles advertised by recruitment agencies and been told that there aren’t actually any jobs available.
“I think [the job agencies are] fishing for candidates,” Punnett said. “They’re looking for people to send them resumes and then [they] go reverse-market.”
There are many financial planning organisations that would love to have financial planning resumes presented to them, and one way to tempt out financial planners is to advertise jobs online, but that doesn’t mean they have jobs available, Punnett said.
“I have interviewed candidates who are looking at jobs all the time, they have said to me they’ve had interviews and asked about the jobs ... and some of them haven’t existed,” he said.
There were many jobs being advertised without salaries attached, suggesting employers were trying to catch more applications, and ads that appeared to suggest they had jobs available in many locations for many roles, but they weren’t ‘real’ jobs, Punnett said.
Recruitment agencies typically have to meet a quota of resumes each month to send to their clients and a job allocation quota for job search websites, but whether they have actual jobs for financial planners is another matter, he said.
Some advertisements for financial planning roles have been reposted up to five times by a single recruitment agency, including one advertisement for a senior financial planner in inner Sydney.
One job advertised for a senior financial planner with experience with high-net-worth clients, located in the Melbourne CBD, has been reposted three times, while an identical advertisement for a financial planning industry fund role appears with both Melbourne and Sydney locations.
Another job posted by job agency QPL Recruitment for a financial planning role in western Sydney offers “fresh vacancies in multiple locations”.
Scott Sherwood, a consultant at QPL, said while there are a lot of jobs that seem identical, they are all real roles.
“They are [real] jobs, sometimes they are looking for very similar skill sets in the exact same area,” Sherwood said.
“If they have two or three roles in one given suburb, I’m going to advertise those roles,” he said.
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