Watch out for those recruitment cowboys!
September 13, 2008
Moaning about dodgy recruitment consultants seems quite a regular feature on this site, but as this is a major part of my role in HR it’s something that I’m plagued with on a daily basis. Finding the recruiters that work well for me and then continue to do so in the face of difficult assignments or a little bit of pressure is not an easy task.
One thing that has really irritated me lately is the lengths to which recruitment agencies will go to find candidates, and I’ve experienced many trying to directly poach staff from my organisation recently. Now, I’m not naive, I know that there’s a lot of headhunting happening in the world of employment, and I know that employees everywhere are being approached by recruiters looking to fill lots of roles. This doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is when recruitment agents call the actual company to speak to employees that they have identified as potential candidates from company websites or the ever helpful networking sites such as linked in (whoever invented that, cheers very much, you’ve made my job just that little bit harder). To get through to these people the recruiter will pose as a potential client or customer, sneak past the receptionist with a well placed fib and a bit of schmoozing (our receptionist is very good but sometimes the caller is more canny) and once they’ve reached the target candidate, start to pitch various jobs offering the world and more. This, in my opinion, is underhand and very unprofessional, but I have experienced even worse than this:
I am quite fortunate in that many of my employees will inform me if they are being chased by a recruiter and what has been said, so you can imagine my delight when I was contacted by a consultant who ‘really wanted to work with me’, when I had only the day before been told that he was contacting my employees to offer them new opportunities. I have to say I really enjoyed cutting the cheeky blighter down over the phone, and he was most embarrassed. As you can imagine I haven’t received a further call.
Another quite amusing situation happened recently, although for those involved it wasn’t actually that funny. A colleague of mine sent me an email conversation that had taken place between him and a number of other people in similar positions in the region. This had occurred because a slow witted recruitment consultant had sent a group email offering retail vouchers for applications or candidate referrals out to all the potential candidates she could gain details for – many of which were their work email addresses – and she had failed to hide the addresses from all the other recipients. This led to many outraged responses from the people on the list, expressing their disgust at having their email addresses revealed to so many other people, and the fact that they had been portrayed to the industry as a job seeker when they were not looking for a new role. Some of my favourite comments were:
- ‘Pretty shocking behaviour, and doesn’t do the recruitment industry stigma any favours…’
- ‘what makes you think any potential job applicant wants to have their email address made public in this manner? Surely there is more tact in your industry. Please remove me from your books immediately’
- ‘I’d suggest removing everyone’s data from your mailing list as you’ll find nobody inclined to do business with you from now on.’
This example just goes to show how careful you need to be when dealing with the recruitment industry. However there are many really professional recruiters out there and it’s important to see each provider on their individual merits, but you need to continually review the service you’re getting and also encourage your employees to highlight recruitment sharks to you if at all possible.
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