Sometimes candidates and clients
must wonder what goes on in the mind of a Recruitment Consultant and why they
do some seemingly ‘odd’ things during the course of a Recruitment Campaign.
Why won’t you tell me who the end client is?
We recently took a call from a
candidate who we had never spoken to before. They had seen one of our adverts
and had a few questions before they applied. First question was “Can
you tell me who the end client is?”. The consultant declined to answer
that question and the follow up question was “Why do Recruitment Consultants
not tell you?”
The Recruitment Sector is very
competitive with 1000s of Recruitment Consultants out there working vacancies
and building relationships with candidates and clients alike. When a recruiter advertises
a job they are, of course, looking for candidates for the role but they are
also alerting some of their competitors to the fact that they are working on a
vacancy and that the end client in question has made a decision that they are
prepared to pay an agency fee. That alert can be like a red rag to a bull!
It is therefore not uncommon for Recruiters
to try and make an educated guess as to who the client is and then pick up and
phone them to get their hands on the spec and permission to work the vacancy.
One of the ways that they can do
that is to pretend to be a candidate and ring the consultant and ask. “Hi
my name is Bob and I have just seen the role that you have advertised. Before I
do so can I ask who the end client is?”. Funnily enough CVs often never
materialise after you have told them!
This is far from ideal as a
Recruiter but it is also far from ideal as the Recruiting Manager. Suddenly they
are getting 10-20 calls from enthusiastic consultants all telling them how
amazing they are and how they have just the perfect candidate. It is for this
reason that we will always ask clients for permission to advertise a role and
often have to reassure them that the role will be advertised anonymously and
vaguely so they won’t end up being unnecessarily pestered.
Also bear in mind that the end
client might not have communicated to their team and business that they are
recruiting. You only need to have a look at your Linked In profile to realise
that most people know someone who knows someone and the wrong bit of information
released by a Recruitment Consultant to a prospective candidate might be
relayed to that someone before it should be.
Having said this though, it should
be very unusual for your CV to be put forward to a role without you knowing who
the end client is. It would seem to be unfair that they know who you are but
you not know who they are. You just might need to get to know the recruiter and
engage with them before you will get that crucial bit of information.
We will be tackling further
questions like this on this blog. Your questions can be put to us via Twitter, Facebook,
Linked In or the comments below.
Wright
Solutions is a specialist HR Consultancy. We attract, place and develop
the highest calibre candidates in Executive, HR and Learning &
Development roles. Our service is more than recruitment with our
training solutions that give Leadership and Management teams the
competitive advantage for today and tomorrow.
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