NGO accuses recruitment agencies of extortion

A non-government organization, passionate about youth development, on Monday expressed worry about a trend where recruitment agencies use various ways to extort monies from unsuspecting youth looking for job.

iDRYOG Youth Development in a statement issued and signed by Mr Adjei Kwarteng-Amaning, the Founder and Executive Director, said many employment agencies had resorted to extorting monies from job seekers who apply for jobs and invited to come for interview along with GH¢20.00 or more as registration fee.

Mr Kwarteng-Amaning said: “ For a single job vacancy as many as 100 people can be invited all of whom will be charged before they get a hint of which type of company is looking for who…sometimes all applicants are invited for a ‘free’ training which attracts a token of GH¢50.00 or more for training materials.”

He said some of the recruitment agencies had ridiculous terms beyond the registration fee where the very few who got the available job were made to either give their first month salary or a percentage by the agencies.

Sharing some experiences Mr Kwarteng-Amaning said one of such popular recruitment agency, which does a lot of advertisement on radio, invited his organization iDRYOG for likely collaboration but to his surprise the organization said they had about 23,000 registered job seekers in their data base waiting to be assisted to find jobs and even wanted his organization to help with registering more unemployed youth at a fee not less than GH¢20.00.

He said one can imagine how much the recruitment agency was making for providing no jobs for desperate job seekers.

Mr Kwarteng-Amaning called on the authorities to bring the employment or recruitment agencies to order and help sanitize the sector.