My post refers to agency recruitment, as that is the only one I've been involved in.
If the formatting is off, I am on mobile soz.
I (22F) was working as a warehouse operative back when I was 19 through an agency. They had openings for recruitment consultants in March 2019 and they offered me an interview followed by giving me the position.
Everything went well with this agency apart from having to work a lot of unpaid overtime because I was salaried which sucked, but they justified it by giving us profit share although it didn't cover even 5 hours of overtime monthly. Other than that, they were doing everything correctly and legally. This came to an end in January 2021 as I was made redundant due to Covid.
Fast-forward to March 2021, I got another job as an Associate Recruitment Consultant with another company that was dealing with all branches of construction and I was part of the labour division. Anything from CSCS labourers/cleaners to carpenters to crane supervisors. Now, the 3 methods of payment are CIS (self-employed for construction workers through an umbrella company), PAYE Umbrella and PAYE direct.
-CIS you pay 20% on all income and can file tax returns
-PAYE direct you get a tax-free allowance of £12,570 and anything after that you pay income tax and national insurance
-PAYE Umbrella you get a tax-free allowance of £12,570 and anything after that you pay income tax and national insurance, plus the Umbrella fee
When you get paid PAYE umbrella, you get offered a higher rate than PAYE direct because of the fee, but end up with less money after tax. PAYE employees have to accrue holiday pay in a holiday fund crearly labeled on their payslip by law.
Also another thing to add is that labourers are not allowed, by law, to be paid through CIS because they are not seen as professionals and they do not have expenses such as tools.
Now that I got all these boring explanations out of the way, let's get to the malicious bit.
I was directly instructed by my superiors to give every PAYE candidate the rates before tax and fees, only telling them e.g. Umbrella is £14/h and direct is £11.20/h without any further explanation of the difference. Some were questioning it (so I would have to tell them that the higher rate is because of a fee taken by Umbrella) but most of them weren't. Of course they were opting for the Umbrella rate. Not only this, but the hourly rate I was instructed to offer was including their holiday pay, otherwise known as rolled-up holiday pay. THIS IS ILLEGAL.
Sometimes we would get labourers/cleaners that were switched on and would ask to be paid through CIS so they can claim (non-existent) expenses from HMRC, and one of my bosses was so desperate to get someone on the job that he would agree to pay them CIS, but put them down as a multi-trader for example. Again, ILLEGAL.
About 2 months in, I started to feel so down and depressed because I was basically instructed to scam people. I can't call this anything other than a scam. Whenever I wouldn't have someone over my shoulder to check that I'm saying the 'right' things, I would talk the candidates through everything and advise them as best as I can which in turn made them turn down the position I was recruiting them for.
I had a basic salary of £23,000/annum and the commision structure was 2% of any profit per candidate, but I was willing to sacrifice that if it meant another poor worker avoids this POS agency. I only stayed because I had no other prospects/offers at the time.
I had the lowest amount of workers under me, so they decided to ultimately fire me after 8 months which was a major blessing in disguise.
I ended up temping again in warehousing with the 1st agency and I am now happily directly employed (temp to perm) with the best company ever, going up the ladder.
Thank you for reading