Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2012. Its figure of nearly six million unemployed is the Spanish figure at the time, and the job sites and cases described are from 2012.
On an entrepreneurs’ blog like this one, we have seen and explained a thousand ways of doing business. Spain’s age-old knack for crafty schemes (the picaresca) goes looking for business wherever the law is murky. One of those corners, and one that is spreading, is charging fees to take part in selection processes for vacancies in different towns and companies, both public and private.
In a country with nearly six million unemployed, some people try to profit from other people’s misfortune. How far will council budget cuts go in charging fees for job selection? How far will the picaresca go in making a business out of people’s need to find work?
Let’s look at a few examples and draw our own conclusions.
Public sector
Calahorra town council advertised a few weeks of work, with 8 vacancies in its municipal works crew: the usual cover while the council’s permanent staff are on holiday. 176 people submitted applications at the town hall registry, and each application carried a 15-euro fee. Only 111 people were able to pay it, and the council raised 1,665 euros.
Tudela town council, by contrast, chose simply to collect CVs for certain vacancies. It meant administrative work and nothing more, and the only benefit it got was finding the right people for the jobs.
The solution is to draw on the lists of the Instituto Nacional de Empleo (the national employment service), which supplies enough candidates for the requested profiles at no cost. Councils take on no extra costs, raise no money, and avoid charging fees to unemployed people for whom they are a serious burden.
Private sector
More and more cases are appearing on the usual job sites, such as InfoJobs or Laboris, of job offers like 50 administrative posts for the end of August. You reply because the offer looks interesting, and the company that posted it answers your application straight away.
It does so by giving you a bank account number and asking you to pay in 50 euros to enter the selection process for those posts.
Another sad example is one published by Pericial Selección & Headhunting, where several people applied for an offer. The company replied that it had hired a senior consultant, having decided that the person in the post had to be available immediately and up to speed from day one. So far, so reasonable.
The surprise comes further down the reply letter, which invites you to a continuous training programme to fill more immediate vacancies, during which candidates’ job skills will be assessed. Curiously, this on-the-job selection process meant paying 1,425 euros to take part in the training and selection. And, of course, as with any selection process, with no guarantee of joining the company once the training was over.
Featured image: Zarateman, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
