Contrary to what our SEEK applicants would believe, we are not typically in the business of placing bakers into recruitment jobs. As a specialist recruitment provider, and staying on a doughy theme, our “bread and butter” is placing those with recruitment experience into recruitment jobs. And this is the case with most recruitment desks. Our clients mostly pay us to find people with existing experience in their sector. Apologies for stating the bleeding obvious, but quite unbelievably, this blog is read my some clearly masochistic non-recruiters.
In a practical sense, this means that recruiters often facilitate a candidate’s move from one company to another which operate in the same or similar sector. Companies, keen to protect their IP, client base, and supplier relationships mitigate this risk with a “restraint of trade” clause in their employment contracts. These restraints mostly come from a fair and equitable place. If you have trained up a grad for 6 years, facilitated their introduction and growth in an industry, and paid for their boozy lunches with clients, it would be galling for them to leave tomorrow and take 60% of the business you helped them win with them. For this reason, most firms focus their restraint of trade on a “non-solicitation” basis. And this lasts a sensible period. Like three months. Non-solicitation means that the exiting employee can’t approach any clients, candidates, suppliers, or employees of the firm they’ve left for quarter of a year. This gives the former employer plenty of time to get out and press the flesh, update the website, and find a backfill. We then all part as friends and share the odd beer at the Fixings and Fasteners ANZ Conference.
Unless you’re a recruiter.
Us recruiters are a funny bunch. A phrase that I would apply to so much of what we do is “should know better”. We spend our time advising our clients to make an offer quickly or they’ll lose a candidate, and then not offer a new employee until we’ve read The Count of Monte Cristo cover-to-cover. We hire known wrong-uns without reference checks. We make good people redundant after a slow quarter. We do all sorts of things that we advise our clients never to do. And when it comes to letting people leave our businesses, we are often petulant children, and sometimes outright bullies.
One of the favourite tools of the recruitment bully is of course the restraint of trade. Now the truth about restraint of trades is that they are incredibly difficult and expensive to enforce. I don’t think I’ve seen it done in my 13 years in New Zealand, and yet the threat of enforcement is almost a monthly occurrence in our world. Fair restraint of trades are usually respected, and rightly so. Unfair ones are weaponised. And this is why they fall into classic bully territory. As we know, most bullies are cowards who are full of bluster. They may threaten, shove and push, but when you put the prison shank you fashioned in woodwork through their Achilles tendon, they run home to mummy. Threatening to enforce overly onerous restraints of trade is a scare tactic employed my egotistical bullies, typically on more naive and junior individuals.
One example I’ve witnessed is a recruitment firm with a restraint of trade clause which forbids an employee to work with, or be in any way connected, to a competing recruitment firm for a period of 6 months. Now, given they come from a firm that recruits across a number of disciplines, they are essentially being told that they cannot ply their trade for 6 months. What are they supposed to do to pay their mortgage? Become a barista? Busk? In this example, the candidate has received the standard heavy-handed letters from barristers demand they sign another agreement to this extent. The candidate is of course concerned, we are of course not. Sadly, we see this kind of thing too often. Word travels fast in this industry, and it would be very difficult to hire people into a firm who want to see former employees on the benefits. And they’ll waste a whole lot of money just trying to get there, with zero gain, and probably lose a couple more staff in the process. It won’t reach court, and if it does, they’ll side with the person who just wants to make a living, not the big bad boss. On a personal level, I think the GM should have a look at themselves in the mirror, think about what they’re putting another human being through, and punch themselves repeatedly in their stupid head.
So this got me thinking about a solution. Firstly, I think we should all look at our own contracts. If our contracts have a restraint of trade any longer than 3 months and one that prevents someone from making a fair living, we should either change them, or ask for them to be changed without prejudice. And as a rec to rec, before we agree to work with a new client, we need to ask them about their restraint of trade policy and how they treat those who exit the business. If they come across as petulant children, or even worse, bullies, then we need to jog on.
Anyway, I’ve got some big news from the Garden City to share with you guys, but that will have to wait until next week.
^SW
