I once, in the EU, applied to a role at Cognizant.<p>The application process was on-line, fill in a form, then submit and you get a page come back saying you've applied - but no confirmation email, no application ID, nothing.<p>I wanted some confirmation of application, so I tried to contact Cognizant.<p>This turned out to be impossible.<p>I won't go into the long-winded details of all the ways in which trying to contact Cognizant fails; but it was in fact literally impossible to contact Cognizant and say "did you get that application?" and it was all down to simple, basic incompetence at Cognizant - broken email addresses, phone numbers listed but which did not exist, no responses at all from such contact methods that did work, and so on.<p>I never heard back from them about the role, which had been advertized and then re-advertized, for a hard to fill skill set, and that was odd, because I'm a experienced specialist in a field where there is a profound shortage of staff; my suspicion, given the problems contacting them, is that they messed it up.<p>Additionally, I've come since then to have a sense that large consultancies probably take something like 50% of the payment being made by the client, as opposed to the usual 15% or 20% of a recruitment agency.