idealpeople blog

With difficult times often come drastic measures. Unfortunately, it appears that some people will stop at nothing - and some most certainly won’t let any form of ethics or decency get in the way.

So we had an e-mail from a job-board this week, alerting us to what they termed “two bogus CVs” that had been found in their CV database. And by bogus, we understand that they mean they were completely faked by a recruiter and placed in the database.

We thought (hoped?) that this old trick was long gone.

The idea behind it is that recruiter invents CV - recruiter applies for job being advertised by competitor - recruiter gets phone call from competitor, who assumes the “candidate” is genuine” - competitor reveals name of the company they are hiring for - competitor never hears from recruiter/”candidate” again. The recruiter who has committed the deception then has a lead in the form of the name of a company and a description of the job (if they’re really pushing the trick then they’ll also have an e-mailed job description), and can then approach the hiring company looking for business.

This kind of practice has all sorts of ramifications for lots of people - not just the recruiters who inadvertently reveal information to competitors - but it’s also one of the primary reasons why recruiters are so reticent to reveal the name of the company they are recruiting for to genuine candidates, which in turn can cause headaches when multiple recruiters end up submitting candidates for the same role - all because recruiters become reluctant to reveal the names of their customers. Any candidate who has been stuck in this most unfortunate inter-agency tug-of-war: this is what probably caused it.

On some days, it’s hardly surprising that recruiters are seen in a far from positive light.

On a more positive note though - it was fantastic to see a job-board identifying this practice and dealing with it so effectively.