GBdirect Jobs and Recruitment FAQ

1. Why don’t you use recruitment agencies?

   Why should we? We can carry out just about all the tasks that a recruitment agency would do for us, more cheaply, with greater accuracy, and with less hassle. We are unlikely to employ candidates who can’t use Google to find the job vacancies and skills wanted notices on this site. The cost of dealing with inappropriate candidates from recruitment agents is typically greater than the cost of dealing with a random sample of spam enquiries from the Internet. Our experience of dealing with literally hundreds of so-called specialists in IT recruitment, is that they rarely have the faintest clue about the technologies in which they claim expertise.

2. Why do you ask for applications in open document formats rather than Microsoft Word?

   It’s a test of initiative and competence, not an anti-Microsoft move. If a person can’t create a file in more than one format, they are unlikely to have the personal aptitudes and technical capabilities that we look for in candidates. The same applies to people who can’t read our job advertisements closely enough to notice the request for open document formats. Moreover, the difficulty of preserving fancy graphical tricks between one format and another helps our evaluation process, e.g. by removing presentational distractions, it concentrates our minds on the substantive content of CVs.