Protect your resume!

As a job candidate you need to make sure that no one is sending your resume to a company without your permission! That means your recruiter needs to tell you the name of the company that they want to send your resume to.

Three good reasons are:

Has your resume been submitted to ABC Company within the past year?

Do you have any issues with ABC Company?

Would you be interested in this job description with ABC Company?

Some recruiters have relationships with hiring managers who are always looking for top talent regardless to whether they have an open position or not. This too needs to be explained to you up front before the recruiter sends your resume. This is what we call “clearing the candidate ”.

I can’t get over the fact that recruiters, I use the term recruiters “loosely”, still send resumes without clearing their candidates. An ethical recruiter clears their candidates every time. The problem is that certain recruiters have weak relationships all around and they are simply trying to make something happen for themselves, but what ends up happening is the job candidate gets hurt. If your resume makes it to the same place by two different recruiters then it will become a problem for you. Two recruiters, same job, both recruiters say that they are working with you. Icarumba! You see the company is going to need to get to the bottom of this to determine who gets the credit if you happen to get the job. You might not even get that far. The last thing a company wants is a fight over who is really the one working with you on this job. It creates a negative reaction from all parties and starts you off on the wrong foot regardless to what you may think.

Today, more than ever before, you need to protect your resume. There are people out there that if they were to get a hold of your resume would send it all over the place. Some recruiters will ask their job candidates if its OK to send their resume to some of their contacts and most job candidates think “sure, why not”. The problem is that you are going to get burned by this tactic. You should never allow anyone cart-blanche with your resume.

Another excuse that I hear from recruiters is that they could not get in touch with the job candidate so for the sake of time they submitted the resume. Listen, we all understand that in the contingency market it can be a race to submit a resume but when you cannot clear a job candidate then that’s just too bad. You the recruiter have no right to hurt this job candidate’s opportunities.

Some recruiters will send a resume to a company to try to get a job order. This happens a lot and they could be using your resume to do it. Did you ever get this phone call before? “Hey I got great news! ABC Company wants to interview you. I would be like “great news who said you can send my resume there”? Some recruiters will send a resume to test the waters to see if this is the type of candidate they are looking for based on a job description. I don’t have a problem with that as long as they remove the job candidates’ name, address, phone number, email address and the names of prior companies that the job candidate worked for. This allows your client to see the talent and to tell you that they would be interested in meeting this candidate, however, you have NO claims to this candidate with your client if your candidate has already been submitted. What we would do in this scenario would be to notify the contact at the company and to tell them that the candidate told us that their resume has already been submitted.

This approach of always doing what is best for our clients and our candidates seems to work well for us!

Comment by Amber on March 7, 2011 at 11:21am: I agree with most of everything you wrote here, and never send candidates resumes to anyone without discussing with the candidate first. Unfortunately, many people send anything they can find and hope to make it work later. And the fact that many candidates searching for a job apply online to companies and postings mean that the resume is out there.

When a recruiter asks a candidate:

Has your resume been submitted to ABC Company within the past year?

The veracity of the answer depends on a. the candidates honesty b. the candidates memory (applying for dozens or hundreds of jobs means a person probably doesn't know what they have applied for where) c. candidates honest lack of knowledge (job posting did not say who company was, another recruiter sent their resume without their knowledge, etc.)

So, overall, good advice to candidates. But if they have their application "out there", it likely will not stop their resume being sent or sourced without their knowledge and/or permission.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on March 7, 2011 at 12:03pm: Jeff,

While i certainly agree with you that candidates should know where their resume is being sent there are, as Amber says, many times when candidates do not remember or did in fact apply to a job where the company was not disclosed. I have never seen a case where there was a problem for the candidate if two recruiters submitted the resume. Companies normally will always honor the first referral which is now easy as everything is date and time stamped. If they like the candidate they normally do not penalize the candidate because they got the resume from two recruiters.

In fact i have had situations where the candidate did not remember or it had been six months or more since they applied. I sent the resume. The company checked their ATS and notified us that another recruiter had previously submitted the candidate so went back to that recruiter and moved forward with the candidate. Yes i know "but for" but that doesn't always work if the company policy is first referral period.

I have seen recruiters tell candidates that they should never apply with other recruiters because it could cause a "legal" problem. Which is a ton of hogwash and only an attempt to have the candidate as their exclusive candidate, even if they could not place them immediately.

Yes recruiters should always identify the company, candidates should make every effort to be forthcoming with information about prior applications but it is never fool proof. Telling candidates that there could be a problem for them is a bit misleading in my opinion. If there is a big fight between recruiters as to who submitted the candidate it is up to the guy who signs the front of the check as to who gets the referral and the candidate should never be involved. If a candidate gets heat from a recruiter the best thing they can do is say, "I'm sorry, i didn't remember ever applying there but i am sure the company will make the decision in the best interest of the company and will be fair to all concerned" . If a candidate is being harrassed by a recruiter asking them to tell the company anything that will benefit the recruiter, the candidate should drop that recruiter and deal with the company direct or the recruiter the company has decided made the first referral. This decision is between the company and the recruiters involved. Integrity dictates that we not knock a candidate out because there is a conflict about who made the referral. Take it up with the company and leave the candidate out of the mess.

Sometimes candidates will not disclose thinking that they have heard nothing from the first recruiter and maybe the second one can get them an interview. They rarely admit that but if it happens recruiter 2 has no choice but to tell the candidate the company already has their resume and will contact them or the other recruiter if they want to move forward.

Comment by Jeff LeFevre on March 7, 2011 at 12:35pm: Sandra,

You have never seen a case where 2 recruiters sent a resume to the same company and it wasn't a problem for the candidate?

The scenario that took place is some recruiter submitted a candidates resume without his knowledge. The company did not have an ATS system but another local HR person had the resume in an email which happened to be submitted over a year ago. They knew that the candidate was ours but the local HR person called the other recruiter because they were friends and tried to get that person involved.

The other recruiter called my candidate to set up a phone interview with my client. What was amazing to all is the candidate for some reason didn't realize that it was the same job and company that we were working with him on. Call it a mental block or whatever but the client had questions to why this guy didn't know that little fact.

My client told me last Friday that the candidate has to be a dumb ass not to realize that he already has an interview scheduled for the same job with the same company.

Turns out that they did do a phone interview and the other recruiter never prepped him for the interview and still has not given him feedback. It was unfortunate but it shows you that some recruiters do nothing but submit resumes and all suffers. For me I would never give someone my resume nor would I submit a resume to an ad without knowing who it was. Today there is no reason not to know where you sent your resume. That's crazy!!!

Comment by Sandra McCartt on March 7, 2011 at 1:58pm: Let me see if i understand this. You already had an interview scheduled but the candidate accepted another phone interview with the same company from another recruiter because someone internally called their buddy from a resume that was over a year old. The company has done the phone interview so the candidate moved forward.

The hiring manager you are working with thinks the candidate is a dumb ass because of the confusion that was caused by someone internally who called their buddy from a resume that was over a year old?

The error here or overt action of a company employee seems to have caused the confusion. This seems to me to be less the result of two recruiters submitting a resume ,simply unethical behavior on the part of a company employee trying to get their buddy involved.

If the candidate is not hired will it be because he was confused, didn't know his resume had been submitted, or didn't understand it was the same job or will it be because the phone interview did not go well?

It will be up to the company to decide if their employee did something wrong. If they knew that the candidate was yours, it was over a year, you already had an interview set up but the internal person did something wrong you should get the referral if the candidate is hired. In this case i would suggest to the person you are working with that the error is internal, not the fault of the candidate. My thinks if they do not hire him it has less to do with the confusion of two recruiters than it does the result of his phone interview for the actual job.

Comment by Jeff LeFevre on March 7, 2011 at 2:56pm: The first error was over a year ago when the recruiter sent the resume to the client without telling him it was going there.

The second error was the internal local hr person tried to cut us out after presenting and setting up an interview through a director of hr.

Third the candidate then avoided us for a few days, why I have no idea. He said he was real busy. The director of hr told us not to worry about it but he had to go out of the country for a few days and would be back at the end of the week.

We decided to go ahead and prep the candidate anyway regardless to what was going on because this is a company that we place a lot of people for around the country.

We contacted the candidate who then told us the interview was changed to an earlier date and no the other recruiter did not prep him.

To this day the other recruiter still has not contacted him to give him feedback. So today we did. This candidate was a great candidate however when not prepped correctly for an interview....

One great thing about using a recruiter as you know is understanding what a hiring manager is looking for especially the things that are not on a job spec. That bit of information will help a candidate get their foot in the door.

Comment by Sandra McCartt on March 7, 2011 at 7:25pm: So he blew the phone interview. Well rats.

I would guess that the candidate avoided you because the other recruiter had called him. He may or may not have remembered or known that his resume had been previously submitted but once contacted by a recruiter to set up the interview he jumped on it then didn't know zackly what to say to you.

This is a really wacky situation and you are correct if he had been prepped he might have done a better job. I am not totaly sure i would believe the candidate in this case since he avoided you when you were in the process of working with him and had told him you were sending his resume. I suspect that when the other recruiter called him he may have remembered or not but just grabbed the opportunity for the interview thinking that if the company had called the other recruiter he better run with it rather than turn it down.

It also sounds like maybe the other recruiter was told that you had the referral so dropped the candidate like a hot rock.

One of the rare cases where an internal person doing something unethical blew it for everybody all the way around.