I got an email from a local recruiter a few weeks ago and stepped outside during my lunch break to give her a call. On the initial phone call she asked me where I worked currently. After the call I stepped back into my work where I sit back to back with my manager. No more than 5 minutes later his phone rings, its the recruiter calling to see if they have any need of her services. I emailed her while he was on the phone with the recruiter and told her I was not interested and to please remove me from her list for all future positions. That was a stressful 5 minutes.
I ran small recruitment agency for one year long (never again! terrible sharks industry). During that time I saw many non-ethical tactics used by other agencies.
Some recruiters would do what you explain for one of the the following reasons:
a) to blackmail the company in the likes of “I won’t touch your employees if you recruit using my services from now on”.
b) already had a signed agreement with your employeer which didn’t allow the recruitment agency to “touch” any of its employees. You seemed like a match for their new client and the recruiter was checking if your employer agreement was still valid. Of course, this is also seen as blackmail by companies.
This sounds like something which should be transparently open, public knowledge, and public listings...
Can we please just have a matching service run by the unemployment office and also require salary / compensation range for the listed job? (Also that it IS an actual job and not head hunters collecting resumes.)
How is this shady? I worked with a recruiting agency that had a contract to find employees/contractors for a company. I was hired by my last employee through the recruiting agency. I then started working with the agency as a team lead to hire developers.
It would have been unethical for them then to try to place me somewhere else, especially with the inside knowledge they had about the company.
When I was looking for a job, while I was still there. The recruiters I had worked with for years before I started working for thier client, wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole. Fair enough. Now that I don’t work for one of thier clients they would be glad to work with me.
Strongly disagree. I hope you are being hyperbolic. While there is certainly a wide range in competency and the level of value provided by recruiters, many of them are MUCH better than zero stars.
Yes but the unscrupulous ones will be happy to give and receive fake reviews. The more honest ones won't. So it will be hard to tell the difference between a bad recruiter (fake positive and real negative reviews) and a good recruiter (real positive and fake negative reviews).
It's actually really easy. My standard test for potential recruiters: Tell me something about myself. This takes a tiny amount of work -- anybody who has my email address can google me and find a huge amount of stuff. A recruiter who is not bothered to do that will not be bothered to find a job that's good for me.
When I find a good recruiter, I stick with them (as long as I'm shopping in the area that they deal with). I make sure they know that. If a recruiter is good enough that they can value a long term relationship as opposed to frantically trying to meet their sales targets every month, then they are a good recruiter.
The downside is that there are practically no good recruiters ;-). If I'm seriously looking for a job, I look as hard for recruiters as I do for a job. Often I find the job before the recruiter.
I don't think this would work. Anyone that is already using shady business practices wouldn't object to posting a few fake reviews of themselves and their competitors either.
Not to mention that many people burned by those business practices may not even realize they got burned. There's a lot of information asymmetry in the telephone game of candidate -> recruiter -> hr -> hiring manager.
I've checked out https://app.recruitsy.co/ (no affiliation) if you're in one of the more common roles/locations where you receive a lot of inquiries. A directory like this needs to exist.
