A friend of mine sent an email recently and said he wanted to speak with me. He has been looking for a job for a few weeks. I called him and asked what was wrong.
“My resume was submitted by two different recruiters for the same job!”
“And what do you think the problem is with that?”
“They will think that, uh, they don’t know what I am doing. They don’t like receiving multiple resume.” The he said my favorite.
“It makes me look bad!”
I have asked this question for many years as a recruiter because, frankly, I’m curious to know if there is a new reason someone will give me to explain the problem. Let me give you some historical context.
I started as a recruiter in March of 1972. At that time when you wanted to present the credentials of a candidate to a client, there were only three ways to do it:
You mailed the resume
If the client was local, you had a mesenger pick it up and deliver it or
You pleaded for permission to have what was called in the business “a phone send out.” That is the ability to reserve the rights to a candidate pending the receipt of the resume that confirmed what you told the client about the candidate’s background. Once the resume arrived, it was manually date and time stamped in HR and that stamp confirmed the receipt of the resume and was the determining factor as to who “owned the rights to that candidate” if there was a disagreement between agencies.
Pretty primitive, huh? As a result, many large firms decided that they would not accept a referral of a candidate that they received from more than one source in order to avoid being sued for the fee.
Let’s fast forward past the age of fax machines to now.
Companies spend a lot of time evaluating and assessing their recruiting vendors to insure that they are competent anbd ethical. They really want to partner with us. Every emailed resume is automatically date and time stamped by the firm’s systems. Those systems are networked so, unless someone is willing to go to the trouble of changing the time on the server (which they aren’t), they can always send a screen shot to the complaining recruiter to show when they received each resume. Law suits about candidate submissions have almost been completely eliminated!
Those two vendors have been interviewed and contracts signed. The company likes them and now you are going to disqualify someone who two of your prime vendors thinks is qualified and appropriate?
No.
These days, it is seen as a testimonial, not a problem. So, I told him not to worry, to make the company fall in love with him and not to worry.
Oh! I also told him that if he is asked questions by them, tell the truth.
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