I Just Learned Why Some People Don't Trust Agency Recruiters

by Rob Kelly

We had a really bad experience with an agency recruiter the other day.

It started with a cold-call and a resume to me.

The recruiter caught my attention with his subject line (implying that he and I had some previous relationship) — it worked. I opened this email:

email from bad recruiter phishing for a client

…the candidate that the recruiter sent over was a Ruby on Rails engineer (not a PHP engineer which is what Ongig had advertised).

I told the recruiter so much.

And so he tried again with another resume (see email below).

Email from bad recruiter phishing for client-3

That’s when things got real interesting. The second resume he sent was for an employee of a client of Ongig’s.

The main problem we had with this was that the agency recruiter had contacted the new candidate and used Ongig’s name (without an Engagement Letter).

Ongig co-founder Jason Webster, a former agency recruiter, was so upset he phoned the agency recruiter and told him that representing Ongig without an engagement letter was not cool. Jason asked him to “cease and desist” on using Ongig’s name.

What did the agency recruiter do?

He hung up on Jason!

Finally, the recruiter had a couple of choice last words for me in his last correspondence (see the email below).

Email from a bad recruiter phishing for clients and resumes

And we wonder why agency recruiters get a bad rap.

Note: If you want to hear more horror stories about working with recruiting agencies, I found this good piece on “Black Hat Recruiter Tactics” at Nathan Hurst’s blog

[from Ongig.com]

< Previous Post

Comment by Mitch Sullivan on October 18, 2013 at 10:04am: That guy doesn't do recruitment. He's just a spot-trader.

He's also probably been trained to generate business this way, either by one of the mass of dinosaur recruitment trainers out there, or his manager because "it worked back in the 90s".

At the sentence that started "You probably think I'm an idiot..." would have had me nodding my head.

Any recruiter that can't offer me a definitive way to solve a hiring issue*, real or generic, then I ignore - unless I'm desperate, which isn't often.

*Offering me a candidate isn't a definitive solution to a hiring issue.

Comment by Paul Alfred on October 22, 2013 at 10:28am: Thanks for the post Jason ... This guy would not last 4 weeks in the Canadian recruiting market ... He would be black listed...