News

It is (or should be) a moral dilemma for most recruitment agencies… When you focus on building ongoing relationships with candidates and clients, what do you do when a candidate you placed in their last role returns to you for help finding their next role? And how do you ensure that your client knows that you didn't actively pull them out to bill your next placement fee without breaching ethics and privacy laws?

It's a small market and the repercussions of actively targeting past placements can be felt for a long time if word gets out that this is common practice for you. There could be an argument that because candidates receive a free service from agencies while clients pay a fee for successful placement, then agencies should prioritise their relationship with the client and not help the candidate in their next job search.

But what happens when that candidate becomes a potential client and doesn't give the agency work because they hadn't assisted them in their job search? Or when that candidate leaves anyway but maybe not to the best role they could have gone to? It can be a lose/lose situation.

Protecting Your Reputation

As an agency, we have to maintain the privacy of our candidates so of course can't have a conversation with our clients during the candidate's job search. Often the first they hear of our involvement is when the candidate resigns and they ask where they're going to and how they found the job. This is where a candidate can unwittingly damage our reputation in the market. If they don't want to admit to their manager that they were actively job-searching, rather than admit that they submitted an online application or phoned to find out more about the role, they say that they were headhunted. And the next question is “By whom?”

I don't think that the candidate realises that they're potentially damaging our reputation in the market and that this will impact our helping them again in the future. If clients think that we poach people we've placed, they're less likely to give us repeat business so then we have less opportunities to talk to these candidates about in the future. And some clients don't like us placing their employees, even if we didn't place them there.

The Tandem Approach

So putting this into practice, what do we do here at Tandem Partners? If a placed candidate approaches us for work, we delve into their reasons for being back on the market… Is it because their role, the leadership or the structure of the business has changed? Are they moving and the location doesn't suit any more? Once we understand their motivation for wanting to leave, we can coach them on how to have a conversation with their manager, if this is appropriate and the situation can be resolved. But ultimately if they're determined to leave, we ask them to put in writing that they have approached us and ask them to be honest about this.

The best that we can do is assure our clients that we work with integrity and don't actively target people we placed with them, no matter how long ago. Tandem Partners' purpose is to help create better workplaces for the whole of the HR community, candidates and clients alike.

As specialists we will keep working with the profession's reputation in mind, essentially, we will keep 'lifting our bar' too.