They aren't appointments, they are 'opportunities to irritate' job seekers and to try to trick them either into poor behaviour.. A sanction..into applying for something wild that they say 'is your choice' to apply for, but if you don't they will use it to 'prove' you don't ever want to work, to force you to apply for the lowest qualification shittiest jobs even though everyone else is applying for the same jobs because they are forced to.. Most of which don't exist because they are on Universal Job Match, which is a thing monster conned them into buying which just duplicates all the other sites that trawl all the others, but gives them a special out of date reference number. If you point this out, they try to sanction you.
My jobcentre 'lost' evidence of my job search in the walk downstairs, but weirdly also had them on the desk as she said 'as you've provided no proof of your job search' script..EVEN THOUGH IT WAS IN HER HAND. When I pointed this out, she said I was contradicting her, therefore refusing to engage.. And then she tried to sanction me, for not engaging. I asked for her manager and she faked this too, trying to get a colleague to pretend to be a manager. The whole process is an exercise in showing job seekers that people on the public payroll can lie, have no integrity, trick and decieve claimants, and behave in a way that should be illegal, but isn't because the government have asked them to behave like this, and to show you that the world of work (they called the job centre 'the real world'. When I was there) oh yes, they also asked me to sit in a different waiting area, then tried to sanction me for being 'late' for my appointment because they couldn't find me, and also asked me to 'take a seat' and then yelled at me for sitting where they indicated. When I pointed this out, they asked if I wanted to 'disengage from the process' ..ie.. Tried to get me to 'agree' by using different words, to a sanction.
They also pretended to never have heard of the jobseekers railcars, expenses for interviews, crisis loans etc until I brought in printouts from the government websites..
Just a time-wasting exercise the whole thing, all actively set up to both dissuade you from applying for jobs you can get, and from claiming benefit fairly so that you can get on with getting work. I spent nearly half of every week writing letters to stop the sanction threats and explaining to companies why I hadn't got the money to pay the bills, arguing for food bank vouchers even though I knew sanctions would be reversed, and applying for jobs that didn't exist so they can justify the purchase of the universal job match. Its an utter farce