Registered in May 2026 for a senior day-rate contract role. The early stages were handled adequately, but the process stalled badly around the technical assessment. The consultant set up the assessment, told me to hold off completing anything until he confirmed next steps, and then went on leave with no handover - leaving it stuck with no one covering. The recruitment function also appeared to be spread across several handlers who weren't aligned: the initial information I was given about the interview process was inconsistent with what followed. Contact was difficult and disjointed throughout, with basic errors along the way including getting my name wrong more than once. My main contact went out of office with no return date and no proactive handover; the named backup was also out of office when I escalated. Getting any update at all meant contacting four different people over the course of a month. When the rejection finally came by phone, no feedback was offered. It took a written follow-up - in which I said a flat no with no reasoning wasn't acceptable given the multi-stage investment - to get anything at all, and what came back was a single vague sentence with no specifics. During the rejection call I was also asked whether there had been other candidates, which suggested less visibility of the live process than I had as the candidate. Managing candidate communication while the client deliberates is the core of what an agency is paid for, and it did not happen here. If your consultant goes on leave mid-process, expect to do the chasing yourself across whoever remains.