Dealing with duplicate CVs
You’re a hiring manager. Your problem is that you frequently receive the same candidate’s CV from two or more recruitment agencies.
You currently deal with it by either opting to go with the first agency to send the CV, or you bin the candidate and take him or her from neither recruiter.
You’re not dealing with it right. Your real problem is that you’re working with too many bad agencies.
A bad agency doesn’t screen their candidates properly. A bad agency doesn’t disclose their client’s name. A bad agency throws resumes around in the hope that some will get snapped up.
Perhaps you’re working with only one bad agency. One bad agency can poison your whole recruitment process.
A candidate represented by a bad agency doesn’t know which end client is looking at his CV. He can’t give this information to a good agency when they ask his or her permission to represent them for your vacancy.
A bad agency can send you five resumes within ten minutes. But they can’t talk to five candidates in ten minutes to qualify and screen them properly for your company. If you opt for a “first-come first-served” solution, you may not be doing the jobseekers any favours. And if you bin the application, everybody loses out.
Here’s how you solve this problem:
Insist that every CV you receive from your recruitment agency is accompanied by an email from the candidate concerned, giving the agency specific, express permission to be represented by the agency for the role in question, with your company named as the end-client.
All agencies should be doing this anyway. In some places it’s a legal requirement, and in every place, it’s common courtesy.
You, as a client of a recruitment companies, can help raise standards with this small step. You won’t receive any duplicate CVs ever again.
Uh-uh. The real problem is agencies themselves. In the good old/bad old days companies used to do their hiring themselves so if one was looking for a job, one sent one’s resume DIRECTLY to the company oneself, not through an intermediary i.e. an agency. So if one DID send off TWO resumes to the same company then you were just bonkers or simply wasting postage.
Nowadays, the HR departments of most major companies are both stupid AND lazy. THey are stupid because they don’t understand the skills needed for the jobs they are advertising AND they are lazy because they farm these jobs out to SEVERAL different agencies for them to do the ‘dirty work’ for them. Now several agencies have a job, and all THEY know is that other agencies also have the same job. The job gets advertised mutiple times, sometimes using several totally different descriptions. The poor old contractor sees the ’same’ job advertised (unbelieveably) with a) different descriptions b) different locations and c) as both contract AND permanent! He/she then applies for three or four seemingly ‘different’ jobs with three or four agencies. (Its interesting to note that some really thick agencies have advertised the same job with severeal different descriptions in the past). The result? Multiple applications from the same contractor for ‘different’ – but in effect the same – job. Some agencies refuse point-blank to disclose the client OR the location because they are frightened some other agency will steal their job from them, so the contractor is left completely ‘blind’ as to who they might be working for or where they might be working. So its a crap system made by the hiring organizations AND the agencies. If you create a poor system, then don’t be suprised if you get poor results. You made it the mess? You clean it up.
Thanks for your comment Reg.
We made the mess, indeed. Recruitment agencies serve the same purpose as any other outsourced service, whether it’s accountancy or laundry. If the client can’t or won’t do it in-house, they give it to an external agency.
How you manage your agencies is as important as how you choose them. If I needed an extension building on my house, I’d give the builders clear instructions, monitor their progress and ensure the quality of their work is of a sufficiently high standard for my needs.
Lots of companies couldn’t give a toss about which agencies they use, and don’t vet the processes, or sometimes, results, of the agencies they farm out to.
BNP Paribas Fortis in Belgium sends its contract hiring requests to over 700 different individuals and agencies. There’s a clear argument there for moving everything in-house, as they’ve created far more work than they’ve saved themselves.
But I digress.
The end-client has a responsibility to manage its suppliers (in this case, the agency) and the supplier should have an incentive to provide a service that falls within the acceptable guidelines laid down by the client, or risk losing the client.
This includes full disclosure of client name, early and open negotiation of rate, and receiving express permission to represent the contractor to the end-client. Its our job at the agency to solve our clients’ problems, not create them.
I’m disinclined to share your belief that IT professionals are “poor old contractors”. You run your own businesses and should act in a way that protects your best interests at all times. You are service providers and have to choose your strategic partners according to your values and expectations. If the client or the agency doesn’t fit, fire them. The buck stops with you.