Recruitment, LinkedIn, reputations, ethics - all the fun stuff

OK, I’m sure that everyone can think of an example of an unscrupulous recruiter.Sharp practice? Call it what you will….

As much as a good recruiter will often “short circuit” processes etc, they will also be aware of how important service and their own personal reputation and the reputation of their firm is. This has a huge knock on effect on performance and profitability - if the current market deteriorates then this damage is likely to happen a lot quicker than many have experienced before. We have after all been used to a fairly consistently buoyant market in the UK for a long time.

I started thinking about what would (or would not) be considered sharp practice online when I was invited to connect with a recruiter on LinkedIn recently. Looking at the profile, the recruiter had added an extra role to help them network into a business being targeted for candidates. Here’s what is on the file:

“January 2000 – Present (8 years 8 months)

I have added your company for networking purposes only”

There’s obviously some benefits here for the recruiter (rec2rec)

1. Their name may well appear on the company profiles
2. They will be able to connect with anyone from these firms as “colleagues”
3. Will they get notified by LI when a new user from these firms (the recruiter has two businesses on for networking purposes) joins LI on the update screen?

Let’s forget about how the owners/ management of these firms are likely to feel about this. After all, R2R have headhunted consultants since, well - for a looong time, and I don’t see any reason for this to stop. I wouldn’t imagine this R2R would be looking for business from either of the two companies listed for networking purposes and is more than likely to be upfront if challenged on this.

If you were the prospective candidate, how would you feel about this? Would you think this is sharp, or sharky? Would you think it was a creative way to generate candidates? Would you think this was lazy? Worse still - would you think this was just unscrupulous?

There’s lots of ways that recruiters pick up a bad reputation in their offline work. With the increasing adoption of web 2.0 sites by the industry I don’t think it will be long before candidates recognise what is good vs bad practice. The internet makes it very easy to connect with people now - and it is a great to build/ develop/ promote your reputation and service. It should also come with a warning sign as its a great way for bad reputations to spread very quickly!

As always, the right or wrong is decided by customers voting with their feet (or for recruiters - people voting with their CVs and vacancies!) Looking at the pace of growth of professional networking and social media sites in the UK I don’t think it’ll be too long before reputations are dramatically enhanced or damaged for one or two recruiters… I wonder - if you’re a recruiter, does your firm encourage you to source using these sites? Do you do it off your own back? How many firms offer any degree of training or guidelines for their use - a basic list of do’s and don’ts?

As much as the internet has overall been great for business, it has not come without creating some new problems. On the service side, pre web it was really easy to see which consultants were delivering - they were returning their calls, good content to calls etc. It was also easy to check the quality of letter/ mailer being sent. I’m sure most firms had managers check these for any newer consultants. Trying to do that today with the volume of email buzzing in and out of inboxes is more than a full time job - and that’s before you get anywhere near business networking/ social media. Managers already have enough on their plate building their business in what may become a challenging market.

If some recruiters do overstep the mark (remember users on networking sites don’t necessarily sign up to find a new job…) then as well as the reputational damage done to the recruiter, there is another potential outcome - what if there just ends up being too much “noise” on these sites, users are likely to stop visiting them. Not good news for anyone… I don’t think we’re anywhere near that point, but I do think recruiters need to consider their read/write web approach carefully if they are to maximise on it.