Game Industry Union? Not Really...

Ars Technica brings news of "Game industry recruiters form trade group to protect workers", but the way that I look at the letter from first year PEER president , is that recruiters are having a harder and harder time placing candidates into game companies. I saw this at Blizzard, and I saw this at Castaway. When I left Castaway, I had no less than 5 different recruiters from different agencies call me up.
For those who haven't used recruiters before, let me explain how it works. Recruiters take the information of the jobseeker and shotgun it into every possible position in every possible game company they work with. As a game company, the don't want to use a recruitment agency unless they absolutely have to -- they only pay the recruiter if they hire them, and the finder's fee for hiring a recruitment agency recommendation is 10 - 30 percent of that person's first-year salary. Obviously, this isn't good if the recruited employee works for 2 months, and decides that he doesn't fit in the company, or another company offers him better pay, etc, because the game company is out 2 months salary and time, and the recruiting agency, not having fulfilled the minimum number of months is out the commission and finder's fee.
Really what PEER is trying to do is to guarantee their commission by showing that the service they are providing is better than a game company's own efforts to hire, and that the premium on the employees they provide is worth it. Here's the thing, any employee of the games industry worth anything are the ones who actually have the skills and those are the ones game companies want, and those are the ones who have no trouble finding a job. They're also smart enough not to go to a recruiter.
My experience with recruiters has been either they send you the candidates they haven't been able to place (leftovers) or neophytes with no experience and sometimes no skills (beginners), and the by sheer randomness you might get one in a thousand that meets all the requirements. We screened alot of candidates at my last job -- resumes and portfolios galore, and the submissions we got from the website tended to be better than the ones we got from recruiters. That's PEER's objective, to change the perception of people like me who don't trust recruiters.