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Submitted by uwavegeek on
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Good afternoon. 

        I have an interesting thing that happened to me.  One of my employee's put in his notice and left my company.  I had started looking around linked in etc. for possible candidates to replace him and had a short list.  One of my co-workers mentioned this to a recruiter who promptly sent me a resume of someone I had already identified.  This recruiter is now claiming responsibility for this candidate even though we hadn't opened a requisition or even asked for solicitations.  This sounds wrong to me but HR is insisting that he had 'first dibs' over my own networking.  Has anyone else had this type of experience?

 

thanks.

smorison's picture

Sorry for the slow reply, but what's the motivation for fighting this? In the scheme of things does it matter? the focus should be on getting the right person for the job.

 

DISC: 7511

buhlerar's picture

If you're concerned about getting unsolicited resumes and therefore incurring other costs, I can't remember whether this came from Lucht's book or a MT cast, but they recommended you just flatly return any unsolicited resumes and say you're not accepting them.  The fact that you looked closely enough to identify that they sent someone that you already identified (i.e. you read the resume) kind of supports their claim.

By the way, I'm not saying your goal should be to avoid recruiting fees.  I agree with SMORISON, that your main goal is to hire the best candidate.  But if you refuse to pay, then you just have to immediately return to sender unopened (don't read it and then call them unethical).  If you work for Facebook, then perhaps you have so many people clamoring to work for you and you'll get plenty of high-quality candidates without help, so fine -- never pay.  The fact that you were searching on LinkedIn tells me you need to find people, so perhaps this recruiter is providing a valuable service.  It coincidentally overlapped this time, but what would you have done with the candidate if it was a different person than the one you'd found?

Also, as for the validity of your claim that you found them first, if you contacted them through LinkedIn and they subsequently sent you a resume, then you can document the fact that you got it directly first and tell the recruiter to take a hike.  But you're not comparing apples with apples if you simply found a LinkedIn profile.

My advice (assuming your company hasn't expressly forbade you from dealing with this recruiter), is to interview them if they meet your usual criteria.  You don't have to pay the recruiter to interview this person -- if they're not the right fit (which you can't tell at this stage anyway) then no problem.  If they are, then hire them.  You should have a high bar and if they meet it just chalk it up to a lesson learned.  But stay focused on the purpose here, and don't worry so much about the specific path you wish you didn't have to follow.