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The Labour Department is to embark on an exercise to clamp down on illegal recruitment agencies in the country.

Braimah Dauda, the Assistant Chief Labour Officer, who disclosed this in an interview with The Ghanaian Times in Accra on Monday, said the swoop was necessary in view of the proliferation of illegal recruitment agencies.

According to him, the illegal recruitment agencies continued to dupe prospective job seekers through false advertisements on the internet and radio.

Mr Dauda did not disclose when the exercise would be conducted, but said “there is the need to sanitise the job recruitment industry and the Labour Department is putting its axe together for the exercise.”

He explained that to be able to recruit people for companies, the agency should be duly registered at the Registrar -General’s Department and be a corporate body with two or more directors.

The Assistant Chief Labour Officer said a formal request should be made to the Chief Labour Officer, based upon which the department would conduct an establishment inspection to ascertain if the organisation met the necessary requirements to operate.

“This inspection will help us ascertain if the company has got the basic facilities such as an office space, staff and other necessities to operate as a recruitment agency”, he explained.

Mr Dauda said a background check would also be conducted by the police to ensure that the individuals behind the particular recruitment agency were not fraudsters, adding that the agency must have a   resource manager in charge of the recruitment activities”.

He, therefore, advised job seekers to be cautious of the activities of some fraudulent   job portals as they could easily be duped and lured into non-existent jobs

Mrs. Doris Yaa Yamoah, the Public Relations Officer (P.R.O) of the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations, for her part, also urged job seekers across the country to   be cautious about job recruiting agencies in order not to be defrauded

She noted that some agencies were taking advantage of the inadequacy of jobs in the country, to cheat prospective job seekers.

She said thousands of graduates were being churned out by the tertiary institutions into the job markets every year, however, the jobs opportunities were not commensurate with the number of graduates being produced.

In view of this, she said a lot of fraudulent recruitment agencies were emerging and taking advantage of the inadequacy of jobs to defraud   prospective job seekers.

She called on job seekers to conduct background investigations into the activities of the agencies before applying for employment through them.

Mrs Yamoah urged graduates not to go in for just anything because they were desperate for jobs, but rather take time to scrutinise   the agency before handing over their documents to them.

” Take time and go to the Labour Department   to find out if such organisations exist, and even if they have the mandate to recruit for companies,” she advised.