My biggest ever recruitment screw-up!

It’s quite a few years since I worked a desk as a recruiter. But I did, for many years. And I was a pretty good recruiter too. Not great mind you. Just good enough to have a lot of fun, and make a bit of money.

At Firebrand we have hired 25 new recruiters in the past 6 months, so I am spending a lot of time training and coaching. As a result I am telling a lot of stories from my time on the desk. And it reminded me that although I billed a fair bit in my youth, I also made some monumental stuff-ups. And I don’t mean the odd lapse of judgment. I mean gargantuan mistakes. Colossal gaffes that make me cringe to this very day.

A while ago, I wrote a blog about my biggest blunders as a manager of recruiters. But they are mostly forgivable errors, as managing people is such a nuanced endeavor. But today I hope to to exorcise my demons by sharing what is probably the worst of several almighty balls-ups I made as a recruiter.

It was in London in the early 1980s, and the market was starting to boom after a severe recession. I was placing accountants from a pokey office behind Oxford Circus, and frankly the whole industry was a bit of a circus in those days. Don’t get me wrong. It was a real, thriving industry. But it was largely unregulated. It was tough. It was fast. It was brutal actually, but it was exhilarating too.

I loved the cut and thrust of it. We interviewed people at our desks. We had job orders circulated from office to office by motorbike to get the information around the business faster. That’s right. No email and no fax. A good recruiter often placed three or four people a week. In those days, the process of recruitment was undefined, and certainly at the fast end of the market, you simply referred candidates to jobs you thought would suit them, based on the interview you had conducted with them.

Looking back I am amazed that at the time it was routine to refer candidates to roles without their specific permission on that role or that client. It was all too fast. Yes, that was the standard practice in accounting recruitment, London circa 1982.

As a result, we often placed people on the day they came in to see us. In fact that was our preferred modus operandi, as many clients would interview candidates based on our ‘telephone sell’ of their background. Often a resume was not needed at all!

But, often, the only way to secure an interview for our candidates was to send the client ‘CVs’ as we called them at that time. And it was a bun-fight to get your candidates included on the ‘shortlist’. It was truly a case of the quick and the dead, because you were competing against many other recruitment firms of course, but you were also in earnest competition to get CVs to the client before other offices of your company, and also before colleagues in your own office! (Did I mention the environment was competitive?).

But all this is no excuse for what I did. There is no easy way to say this, so here goes …..

I sent the resume of a qualified accountant, a delightful young woman, to her own employer!

There it is. I did the unthinkable. I was moving so fast, that I quickly matched a job description with a candidate and put the two together.

And it was a good match too. It was HER job!

Did I realise my blunder? No. I found out by the client calling me. “Did you send me the resume of Mary Candidate? “ he said in a quiet monotone. “Oh yes sir, I certainly did” I gushed, still unaware of the horror about to unfold. “ Well this is just to inform you that I am her boss and until now I was unaware she was looking for a new job. Thank you for this information.”

“Click”

The horror. The shame. The guilt.

I phoned her. Many times. She never took my calls. Never called back. In fact I have never spoken to her again.

And to be honest I don’t know what happened to her or what the consequences for her were. Labour law was not nearly as supportive of the employee in those days, and she could easily have lost her job. At the very least, I put her in an awful position.

But in the long run the whole diabolical episode did me a lot of good. For a start, it brought me down a peg or two. Made me realise that there was a major flaw in the way we were doing things. (I was only in my early 20s and we were being told, ‘This is how it’s done’.)

It also taught me the importance of care and process, and it reminded me of our duty to candidates and how attention to detail counts.

I never made a mistake like that again.

How about you? What is your biggest recruiting stuff-up? Your darkest recruiting hour?

Come on, please tell us. Tell us your tale in the comments section below. The secret you never wanted to share.

You will feel so much better!

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Comment by Sandra McCartt on May 3, 2011 at 5:23am: I was working on a confidential search (read replacement after somebody gets fired). So confidential in fact that my boss gave me the name of the company with the instruction that if I released it I would be shot before the raven left the limb at sunrise. It was my very first confidential search for a CFO so I was determined to find the best in the west in this cloak and dagger secret world of being a headhunter.

I mentioned to a friend that I was looking for a CPA with big eight (in the dark ages there eight) background. She had an aha moment, said she had met a fellow at a chamber meeting who was a CFO but she didn't know who he worked for or if he had big 8 background. (if you see this one coming you have been a recruiter longer than I had been at that moment).

Wonderful sez I. How about you call him, tell him a headhunter would like to invite him to join us for dinner so I can interview him over dinner. She asked who the job was with. I sprained in my best covert operative tone of voice that it was highly confidential. Off to dinner we went. Enter the target. He was drop dead gorgeous, had been a senior manager with kpmg, graduate of William and Mary and had moved to the city to join a company six years previously as their CFO. I was very busy selling my confidential CFO listing, explaining of course that it was highly confidential so I would not be able to release the company name until my boss and I went over his resume with the owner of our client company. I did a great selling job. He was interested, very interested. We agreed that he would drop his resume off to me at my office the next morning.

Thinking that I had landed the big fish, I hit the office early to tell my boss that I had in record time found the replacement for her secret job. She was amazed when I gave her the download and asked who he was with currently. I had forgotten in my big sell to ask him who he was with currently but splained quickly that he was on his way to the office to bring his resume and meet with both of us so she might want to call the client to drop on over. She did. I was about to be a hero.

My super recruit arrived, I buzzed my boss announced he was here and we were coming to her office. We walked into her office, I handed her one copy of his resume sat down and opened my copy just as she looked at her copy. My life passed before my eyes. I had managed to recruit the guy for the company that was getting ready to fire him as fast as I could find a replacement for him and his boss was on the way in ten minutes to meet this paragon of all things financial whom I had so cleverly managed to find in only one day.

My boss looked at me with a look that made me grateful that the office windows on the 17th floor did not open and were shatter proof. After a frozen moment in time I recovered enough to say something to the effect that his resume looked great but since mrs. S. Had a meeting in a few minutes, why didn't he and I run downstairs to the coffee shop and visit a bit. I hustled him out the backdoor of the office and onto the elevator just as one of the other elevators opened.

Neither of the gentlemen involved ever knew that Ms. Superstar had narrowly averted a recruiting disaster of the first order. I did find his replacement, he got fired. I placed him out of town so he would never know what a debacle I had created. My boss suggested in no uncertain terms that it might be a good idea to find out who a candidate for before I did the whole dog and pony show. As I recall I didn't sleep much until the whole thing was over. Yuck...

As George Carlin would say, it was a near hit.

Comment by Tami Brittain on May 3, 2011 at 11:25am: You know, as it's still very fresh (and painful) in my memory, all I can say is that the EXACT same thing recently happened to me... this has been over the past few weeks.

All I can say is that my prescription for Ambien ran out during this time, and, well, my liver is still recuperating after my faux pas. :/

Comment by Ineke Read on May 3, 2011 at 6:13pm: Not as bad as above, but recently sent a confidential invoice for a retained role that I was recruiting to the CEO, and our accounts division chased it up with the CFO when no one in the company was supposed to know about the role! The issue was quickly averted because we managed to call it a consulting fee.....