Temporary staffing agencies: so *this* is where all the jobs have been hiding
I'm trying to escape my 'black' company and haven't had much luck applying to jobs through LinkedIn, individual company portals, and that kind of thing. Massive amount of effort just to apply, creating usernames and passwords everywhere, filling in the online forms with the same information over and over, drop-down menus that never include your situation; requests for copies of all kinds of personal information; companies never want to reveal their salary range. There are always dozens of applicants for every position so you're doing all this with extremely low odds of getting anything out of it.
My wife has always found work through a temporary agency and keeps recommending that I find a job that way, so I finally signed up. It's been a breath of fresh air, at least so far!
Signup didn't take that long; there were checkboxes where you could indicate what skills you have; no intrusive requests for proof of anything aside from your visa situation. Within 24 hours of signing up, I got a call from an agent who had a job she wanted to place me in immediately. I wasn't quite ready to commit so soon, but it was a pleasant surprise.
Most welcome was how salaries are posted up-front for every single position. The agent even told me that the market rate for English-Japanese bilinguals doing office work is about 1800 yen per hour, so that's what I should expect. You can straight-up tell them that you want to make X yen per hour or you won't sign; you can specify hours, location, anything. (They're very accustomed to working with mothers who need to plan around childcare and such.)
It was a great phone call after months of frustration with direct-applying and dealing with recruiters. Sure, the salaries aren't amazing and there's not as much employment stability, but knowing that you can probably have a job within a week if your skills match up is such a relief. Am I missing something, or is this a great shortcut to finding employment? I wish I had looked into getting hired this way sooner!