If you’re not the client of a recruiter, then it is highly likely that they will be contacting your staff with a view to headhunting them for another role.
The title is not a phrase I coined, but I do heed the message and, commercially, it’s obvious.
Recruiters spend a considerable amount of their day headhunting. Agency recruiter, in-house recruiter, every experienced recruiter has an idea of who would be well suited for their clients’ business, even if those people aren’t actively looking for a change of employer, yet.
No matter how a recruiter targets your employees for another role, be it; a ‘direct approach’, ‘tap on the shoulder’ or ‘a fortuitous stumble across someone that fits the bill’, the intention is to lure them out into an opportunity that might represent something more meaningful to them.
To avoid falling foul of the grey area that sits between recruiting for your business and sourcing recruits from within your business, choose your recruiter wisely.
Partner with a consultant and there’s trust, work with someone and it’s transactional. Here are a few tips on how to choose your recruiter:
For a recruiter, trust is built based on a variety of things, but in part, on you giving them work, that is job vacancies to recruit for. One might draw the conclusion that to prevent every recruiter in Melbourne from head-hunting your staff, you could simply give them each a ‘job vacancy’ to work on. It’s not as easy. You can’t have every recruiter working on all the jobs because they will realise their competition is so high that it’s not worth their time. Recruiters, like staff, like any stakeholder, wish to feel needed and valued too.
Side note: Having a client engage you exclusively for a particular vacancy in your business is the utmost level of respect. When you do the opposite (and engage multiple recruiters), it sometimes results in a less thorough search by every single one of those recruiters. Would you prefer one, maybe two selected recruiters working tirelessly and methodically on your role or six recruiters doing a half-baked job?
Us recruiters work tirelessly to build enduring and engaging relationships and therefore compromising this fine web of beauty would be futile, would it not?
Here’s an inside look at how recruiters manage this relationship:
In this instance a recruiter should not headhunt ever, from within one of their client’s businesses. It is unethical to do so. But if a job seeker reaches out to them directly (e.g. via LinkedIn, Seek, or any other platform), they may still accept that job application. Experience would deter the recruiter from acting on this pro-actively, however, some agencies would honour the duty of care they have to their candidate job seeker and work with the candidate. The ‘pay off’ for having a No Headhunting policy within the agency is that if a candidate approaches the recruiter via advertising for example, then it is fair game.
The downside of this approach for the recruiter of course, is the long wait for relevant candidates to respond directly to job postings. If you have been around any length of time, you’ll know that patience is not a virtue of many recruiters.
If a recruiter does not work with a specific company, then it would be fair to approach staff working there when they seek to fill a vacancy. You should be able to rest assured that if you instruct a recruiter to work on a job vacancy for you, they categorically should not be talking to your own staff with the intention of headhunting them. Beware however, being half-in and half-out. Asking a recruiter to ‘send C.V.s’ for a job vacancy and then providing late C.V. feedback, not getting back to them or changing your tact at a later date is not going to give best results either. This creates a grey area and leaves you wide open later for being, well, on the menu.
The key to success here is the relationship you have with the recruiter. Sometimes a recruiter will connect you with an amazing candidate and it’ll be a one hit wonder. Or you may prefer a more ongoing but informal arrangement that is not necessarily cemented in writing, but more by a relationship built on regular conversations and a mutual understanding. If you have recruiters on ‘the side lines’, who are sometimes in and sometimes out, beware.
Likewise, a recruiter who speculatively sends C.V.s daily or weekly is paper pushing and could be sending the C.V.’s of your staff to competitors.
The best way to avoid the grey, is to make sure your recruiter feels connected to you enough so that they simply don’t want to break the trust you share. Connection requires time. It’s a business relationship that needs nurturing. This is another reason why it’s wise to only use two or three (maximum!) recruiters; because relationships take effort and energy. Having ten recruiters know enough about your business to know its flaws but not well enough to feel allegiance to you isn’t the best place to be. It leaves you vulnerable.
Similarly, find a recruiter who feels in control of their own job. Anyone who is going to be pushed around by their manager, asked to find another candidate, make that extra call, send that extra C.V., is likely to be less connected to you, thus, again, you leave yourself open. Dare I say it again, but this is exactly why it’s sometimes good to engage with a recruiter who has been in the industry for a significant amount of time. They feel part of the industry and their reputation is paramount.
Recruitment and in particular headhunting is a complex web of ethics and morals. I think it is time to make gentle, subtle changes to both the way recruiters recruit and to how clients, hiring managers, HR teams view our services. Recruitment, when done well, should be a pleasure for everyone involved, as with all good things in life, it takes time.
Feel free to reach out should you need help throughout the process. Contact us.
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