It took me about five minutes to do a complete circle around the booths the job fair had to offer and about 70% of those booths were recruitment agencies. After spending the last month looking for a job and putting all of my hopes into this opportunity, I felt upset and disappointed. The few non-recruitment agencies were not hiring for the position I was looking for, and my past experiences with recruiting agencies in the U.S. involved spam messages on LinkedIn. I did talk to a few agencies just to see what they had to offer, and they told me to go on their site to contact them or look for jobs.
At this point, I considered this whole trip to be a complete bust. I spent a massive amount of time preparing, and my whole Saturday morning was spent getting on a bus with my nice clothes and printed out C.V.s and all for nothing. Almost ready to call it a day, I decided to attend one of the seminars they offered on how to prepare your C.V. I considered mine to be pretty good but I was up for confirmation on the exemplary piece of paper I brought. This is where reality set in and my ego was deflated.If I told you that my C.V. was not what Dutch companies are looking for, it would be the understatement of the century. I realized throughout this seminar that the several copies I had made of it werenothing other than the murder of a bunch of trees. I needed to start completely from scratch. As soon as I got home, I scheduled a Skype meeting with an agency to go over my C.V. and see if they could help me find a job. After two sessions, I was confident that my C.V. looked much better and shortly after, I was offered a job. Finally!
During the seminar on writing your C.V. for the Dutch job market, I learned exactly how recruitment agencies could help. The greatest thing is that they can be as involved as you need them to be. Whether you are just looking to use their basic job search platform, or if you need some extra help with your C.V., they have plenty of valuable resources to use. There is a reason they are used so often in the Dutch job market, especially by expats. For anyone who has spent longer than a couple of weeks looking for a job unsuccessfully, I’d recommend you reach out to a recruiting agency immediately and save yourself some stress and heartache.
Ashley Herbert