Has anyone here ever had to deal with the Job Centre? And if so, did you find them to be useful?
Job Centre staff seem to have a reputation for being very unhelpful and very rude, patronising etc. So I was a little worried when I went to claim benefits last month.
Fortunately, the staff at my local Job Centre were quite polite. Of course, they weren't much help as they can't really tell me about any job vacancies that I haven't already found myself on the Directgov website.
I had to go to a 'Back to Work' session at a different, much bigger Job Centre last week. There, they had receptionists who were disguised as security guards . The Back to Work session was quite pointless. It reminded us of what we need to do to claim dole money and methods of finding work, as well as informing us about a couple of case studies:
1. One of their customers got a job sprinkling garlic on chickens for 12 hours a day.
2. They paid for someone to travel by train to the south of England, then by ferry to an island so he could attend an interview, then stay there overnight, and come back the next day. They didn't say whether or not he got the job.
The two people running the session, who had also recently been on the dole, seemed to want to get it over and done with as quickly as possible. I don't think anyone who took part in the session actually spoke, other than one person who said 'Job Centre' when asked about what websites we visit.
Also, has anyone here visited any job vacancy websites? I was given a massive list of then in the job centre the other week. Most of them tend to be duplicates of each other (when there is actually something on it to duplicate) and the rest just try and collate all the vacancies from all the major sites. I have generally found such sites to be rather useless.