Problem with a client.....would appreciate other recruiters take on situation

Been at this for a long time and have been very fortunate in my relationships with my clients....have always been able to trust them to adhere to the "rules of the road" in hiring/utilizing an outside recruiter. Evidently....no longer true.

My client in this instance dismissed a candidate from a list of potentials I had ID'd for them. I'd agreed to submit candidates names early to "speed things up"....not my usual. Client said they'd already interviewed this person. OK...I moved on. I'd hunted down/researched and interviewed the candidate, presented the job, had him on board for interviewing, had his resume ready to submit to the client....but, trusting them, I dropped him and moved on.

Weeks later, the client, after zeroing in one of my candidates, telling me they "loved her", flying her in for an all day interview, said they wanted to hold on to her while they reorganized around the position as she was over the line in salary...gave the impression they were working something out.

A couple of weeks later received a call from them saying they had decided to hire someone else. End of story..... HOWEVER, I was curious to see who they had hired so watched their site/LinkedIn etc. and discovered they had hired....YES...that one....the one they told me to DROP....because they had already interviewed him.

Turns out...they had interviewed him prior to my suggesting him for this position....over a year ago.....for another position.

Am I wrong to feel cheated in this case? I'd really like to hear from another recruiter and get another perspective. I'm not one to walk away and let a client just dismiss me after I've found them a candidate and they hired them.

Any input would be appreciated.....THANKS!

Penny Alexander

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Permalink Reply by lisa rokusek on September 1, 2011 at 5:42pm

I had an interesting situation a few years ago right when I started out on my own. I got a call from a VP needing a contractor and I sent him a guy. The guy was awesome, they loved him. Later the VP quit. I got a call from the CEO who needed a new VP. He signed a fee agreement (position specific) for 25%, and I started making some presentations. My contractor also interviewed. They ended up hiring him to be the new VP.

The CEO (who was and is several different flavors of jerk) refused to pay a full fee fee on a guy that he had as a contract employee in another position. We talked about it. I offered to use the conversion terms from his development position that were part of the consulting contract as a compromise. He refused. He sent me a 4 page single spaced email talking about the depreciation of an employee's value. As if he was a copy machine. As if that had anything to do with this situation. What CEO has the time to type emails to me? Probably cost as much in his time as the fee.

Craziness, Oi! It was an amazing lesson. Had I been inclined to fight him I think I might have won, but I had no extra cash.

Hilarious. Only not. I settled on a 20K fee, licked my wounds and tried to wipe the jackboot impression off my face. Sometimes agreements are helpful - I often think of them as sales/educational tools. Sometimes, when a client is an ass, they are not useful. The disinclination to honor an agreement renders the paper representation less useful.

Then one has a whole different set of choices. I've made several placements at that company since then and gotten paid. It no longer burns like it did, but I'll never forget it.

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Permalink Reply by Sandra McCartt on September 1, 2011 at 6:03pm

Penelope you have some candidate error going also on this one. I would indeed make some noise with somebody that they did not contact him for this position. He contacted them after you had told him about the position and would not have contacted them after being turned down over a year ago if you had not recruited him.

It may not make any difference but that puts a little bit different light on it since he reached out to them instead of vice versa.