Dealing with recruitment  companies   can seem  like a looking fight with very little feedback being received . I have  been employed   within the engineeirng jobs industry  myself for over 10  years and have worked with  recruitment agencies of all sizes from single owner operator business to large multi national  agencies   and one thing is remains the same no matter who the company  is they are all sales based  and you must as a candidate not forget this when dealing with them.

Most recruitment  resources   are 80% sales and 20% actuarial consultants, meaning a large part of their time is taken up dealing with  potential employers   and trying to  win   new business to ensure they hit targets, after all if they fair to hit their revenue targets then they themselves may find they are also  a job seeker  

One of the largest complaints i get from  job seekers   is that once they have applied for a job or vacancy  their is little feedback from the recruiter and most will expect that the recruiter would normally get back within 24 hours after the initial application, nothing could be further from reality, put yourself in their situation, if you called every candidate  that had applied for one of your vacancies  you would find yourself working 10 house a day 7 days a week just notifying  job seekers   of their applications.

Following up on applications should be a candidates  main aim after the application, not the next hour or the next day but leave it 7 days as a minimum as most recruiters  will only review the application once the  vacancy   has reached its expiry date and this can is some cases take up to 4 week 28 days. By being proactive you may also discover more and new vacancies that the recruiter is handling along with gaining the feedback from your initial application.

Try to be proactive and talk to recruitment agencies, even pop in to your local  recruitment agency   to see what vacancies  they are working on, they may even take your CV and submit this to local companies even if they are not working on any current requirements for them. You should also act as your own recruitment company and submit your CV to local companies, if your looking for engineering jobs send your CV to local engineering companies.