I had a call yesterday from an old candidate down in Wellington. I missed it as I was out peddling my wares to a prospective new client. Before I could call him back, I received the following text from them: “Let me know if you want a topic for your Friday article”. As you would imagine, the hardest thing in writing New Zealand’s third-best recruitment blog is thinking of a topic, so a gift horse like this is not to be looked in the mouth.
The story from my contact goes as follows; they are currently recruiting a contract vacancy in Upper Hutt and they have advertised this role. My contact, let’s call them Mr Papagiorgio (because I can), always puts their phone number on their ads, especially for contract roles, as they want to remove as many barriers to application as possible. Sensible lad/lass. They get a phone call from someone introducing themselves as Morris Mitchener* (*again, not his actual name), enquiring about the role. The phone number is not withheld. Now here’s the thing; Mr Papagiorgio knows Morris Mitchener as they have worked together previously. And this Morris doesn’t really sound much like the Morris that our protagonist Mr Papagiorgio remembers. Strange but not conclusive. As they chat about the role, Mr Papagiorgio scoots over to their ATS and looks up the details of Morris Mitchener. Sure enough, both the number and email address for the actual Morris Mitchener do not match what the caller has provided. Mr Papagiorgio asks the caller about this. “Oh, I’ve just returned from working overseas so got a new mobile. This is my new number and email now”. By this time, the dubious Morris Mitchener has figured out who the client is and has made an excuse as to why they’d never work there, and promptly shuts down the conversation.
Mr Papagiorgio, being the diligent type, calls the “old” number for Morris Mitchener. Of course, I needn’t say that the real Morris Mitchener answered and confirmed that they haven’t been overseas, hadn’t changed their number, and most certainly hadn’t just called about a contract opportunity. And of course again, when our friend Mr Papagiorgio called the client, lo-and-behold, they’d just had a BD call from a recruiter who seemed to know all about a vacancy in the team.
Recruiters pretending to be candidates is nothing new. Although less common in Aotearoa, it’s certainly one of many underhanded business development techniques used (and taught!) in the more aggressive London market. The two things that make this one stand out though are the fact that they didn’t withhold their number, and that they had the tenacity to impersonate an actual person. When it comes to the telephone number, perhaps this person does this so often that that have a “burner” phone for this very reason? Regardless, I have the number and you can have it also if you want. If the scam itself doesn’t seem too far out for you, the bit that most definitely is, is impersonating someone else. Not just impersonating them, but encouraging someone to delete the correct contact details of the person they’re impersonating. Is this even legal? It’s certainly awful. If you’re going to use this “technique” to find leads, why not just use a fake name? Like Mr Papagiorgio.
We’ve had similar accusations of late flying around our own little corner of the recruitment world. I seem to remember being shown a LinkedIn post from a Rec-to-rec (who blocks me on LinkedIn) accusing another rec-to-rec of a similar tactic. In this instance, the allegation is that a rec-to-rec was advertising a role. Another rec-to-rec then sent a recruiter they had just placed in to enquire about the role and who the client was. The rec-to-rec was (allegedly) wise to this tactic, and publicly outed the mole by name on LinkedIn. The truth we’ll never know.
My view is that tough times encourage bad behaviours. However, although things have been slow, I really don’t think we’re at the stage where we have to start trying to steal from each other in this way. It’s not hard to find out who’s hiring. The hard bit is building the relationships, finding the star candidate, and closing the deal with a sh*t offer. When it comes to rec-to-recs trying to find out who’s hiring, I’m dumfounded. Every recruitment firm is hiring if you are representing good enough candidates. We have many struggles in rec-to-rec, but finding clients really isn’t one of them.
Anyway, I haven’t called Morris Mitchener yet, but I might pocket-dial him at 2am tomorrow whilst practicing my bagpipes.
^SW
