The Battle of the Intros

Following on from the IOR poll last week  - the battle of the intros.....

You send a CV for a candidate that you have interviewed, and with their consent, to a client. The client replies to say that they have already received the CV from another agency. On checking you discover the other agency have sent the CV without your candidate’s consent, albeit before you in time. The candidate wants you to proceed with the introduction. Whose intro will count? Been there, done that, and bought the proverbial t-shirt? 

Conflicting and competing introductions are one of the biggest headaches for recruiters. Sometimes that is entirely the candidate’s responsibility – they have registered with the world and his wife, posted their CV on a dozen internet sites and spoken to every internal contact they can muster to find a job. You are snookered!

More irritatingly there are instances when candidates are more careful about whom they talk to but are badly served by agencies who simply send their CVs around all sorts of places without their informed consent. If you have a candidate who is prepared to confirm they did not authorise the recruiter to send their details to the employer in question and will put that in writing, then you have a good chance of salvaging the introduction, whoever sent the details first.

The comments about the 'desperate candidate' are well observed - it often is the case that all the candidate wants to ensure is that they get the interview and therefore will do almost anything to make that happen.

Data protection legislation can assist - more of that to come in later discussions - but in practical terms make sure you have the candidate on side, that you have their consent to the introduction, and if at all possible get them to confirm this in writing to send on to the client - all good advice as proffered above - will be the best way to try to ensure that it's your introduction that counts.

As was apparent from the IOR poll last week there are recruiters out there who will send the CV without telling the candidate - be that because they are not acting professionally - or as observed by some - are acting as a 'preemptive stike' using their experience. If a dispute arises from either the unscrupulous recruiter or the desperate candidate - try to make sure you have the ammunition you need to show your introduction was legitimate and consensual

For more information on this subject, please contact dispute resolution specialist Heather Stanford or join the debate on in our eForum on Linkedin