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One of the many positive things that came out of the Quality of Service Questionnaire we ran in June was that people liked our independence within the industry, and that they could be sure that when they joined our umbrella company that their details weren't leaving the Gabem offices.

We found this a little surprising as perhaps naively we had assumed that most umbrella companies were behaving in a similar fashion. I took upon myself the task of doing some background research on a random sampling of companies to see what I could find.

I'm going to come right out and say that from what I could see most companies had no obvious or unexpected links to other bodies in the contracting industry, so most of you can breathe a sigh of relief. That said a few companies had some very eye opening relationships, I'm not going to name names, but there were companies sharing private server space with recruitment firms and jobs boards, and other businesses catering to contractors.

It's not a cardinal sin of course, but it is one of those things that could compromise the impartiality of a service or mean you have to put up with additional marketing mail or calls. I can assure you that it's not a road we're going to go down, but it has been eye opening seeing what everyone else is up to.

Yours independently

Hugo
@GabemUmbrella
04/12/2009