English Country Gardeners

Not who they used to be.Had an awful recent experience. We wish we’d used a different agent.They are having trouble finding us a ‘free’ replacement member of staff as per their terms and conditions after we had to pay them a huge headhunting fee … what happened was the man wanted to start early and in kindly trying to accommodate this the final references were checked within 2 hours of him starting. Sadly they didn’t check out. In their eyes this counted as a ‘successful’ candidate placement as he had been with us 2 hours and we were made to pay their 6k fee. They became very aggressive pursuing this payment saying if we didn’t pay it in 2 weeks it was going to be 8k as per their terms and conditions. They just didn't care about the very justified issues we had. We had numerous heavy emails and my husband being a senior banker in the City who had some of the chats with them was horrified at their attitude. He deals with headhunters in London all the time. Since then, we have only received a few cvs - including one from an ex member of our gardening staff who we fired many years ago! Do they check these people properly or just churn out any old cv to you?My lovely gardener who left after 5 years went for a more prestigious job we couldn’t offer him here. He highly rated Allstaff in Bedford. We would have been charged just 600 by them for our experience above. So it pays to shop around. Their definition of successful candidate is someone who lasts at least 3 months. With this agent the fee would have been 8k at 3 months and only payable then.So it would have been a very different experience.Let’s see if any suitable staff come from my ‘free’ replacement offer. I will report back.