This is the second in a short series of tales that all left me with the same feeling; that I need to increase people’s respect for me and what I do.

The scattergun candidate

All recruiters want to work with great candidates and we all want to find that particular jewel of a person that has not worked with any other recruiter and is not generally known to our clients.

A few weeks ago we received an email in our admin mailbox from a pretty good candidate; one that we had met and had worked with in the past. This email was announcing that she was finishing her current assignment on the coming Friday and was asking us if there was anything relevant to her around; attached was her latest CV. The trouble was that she had used the “cc” box and we could see that it was sent it to over 400 mailboxes including all our clients. Included with hundreds of recruiters there was a broad selection of admin@client, info@client, recruitment@client, etc and also the business emails of our clients at HRD and MD level, some poor MDs even received two copies. We deleted our copy.

Two days later the same candidate emailed me to ask if I could get her an interview with one of my clients as there was a role on their website that she’d be suitable for and had submitted her CV directly to them but had received no response. That client was also included in the mail two days previously.

Now, here’s the problem; there is a very slim possibility of anyone getting a fee from that candidate as she’s unfortunately effectively blocked out the third party recruiters by her actions. It’s probably the case that the PA of the senior operational people had deleted the email and hence would have no record copy but this is unlikely to be the case in the HR or recruitment teams (if they’re any good at record keeping and retrieval, that is).

There was too much of a commercial risk and we can’t prevent this happening but we can choose who we represent and sometimes it comes down to commercial realities.