Tired of CV duplicates?

You’re the contact point for a company that is hiring. Your problem is that you frequently receive the same candidate’s CV from two or more recruitment agencies and don’t know what to do. You currently deal with it by either opting to go with the first agency to send the CV (probably the one who isn’t earning their fee), or you bin the candidate and take him or her from neither recruiter. You need assistance on how to deal with this correctly as this is not the way to deal with things to help you in the long term. Your real problem is that you’re working with bad agencies, under pressure to send numbers of CV’s as targeted. A bad agency doesn’t screen their candidates properly. A bad agency doesn’t disclose their client’s name for paranoid reasons. A bad agency throws CV’s around in the hope that some will get snapped up. Doing 50% of the job but wanting 100% of their fee without doing any of the professional pre-qualification work that you pay them to do. No screening, no qualifying, no references.....nothing but placing and ad, skills matching, and putting their logo on the CV of an applicant and emailing it to you, then sitting back and waiting for an interview to happen. Would you want that agency representing you if you were job seeking or the one that took the time with you? Perhaps you’re working with only one bad agency. Unfortunately, one bad agency is enough to poison your whole recruitment process and drive a wedge between a trusted and honourable relationship that existed before this happened as it is usually the company that conducts itself correctly that suffers and in so your levels of service in the long term. A candidate represented by a bad agency doesn’t know which hiring company is looking at his/ her CV (it’s a legal data-protection requirement for people to know where their data has been sent). He/ she can’t give this information to a good agency when they ask his or her permission to represent them for your vacancy and so the duplication happens. The candidate doesn’t have the chance to sell him/herself for the particular role, tell you whether they ever applied to that company in the past, or knows someone in the company from a previous job that they liked or perhaps had issues with. Also, the bad agency doesn’t care about why the candidate left previous roles, look for breaks in the CV, what salary they are looking for, any health issues etc. Basically, what you pay them to do! 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 potential offers could be turned down as the bad agency doesn’t know what is driving the applicant to change jobs. The last resort is binning the CV. If you bin the application, everybody loses out and innocent parties get punished for doing nothing wrong other than working professionally or simply applying for a job. The bad agency has no guilt as they normally get CV’s to you first then act innocent when questioned, blaming everyone else. It’s the agencies that care about services levels that somehow feel guilty for fighting their corner and for doing the job that you pay them to do. Here’s how you solve this problem: Instruct each agency that they MUST email a confirmation to every candidate confirming their conversation (not a simple “I’ve sent your CV”), stating that they sent the applicant’s CV to your company name, and vacancy applied for as evidence that they did what they are supposed to do or 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. You, as a client of a recruitment companies, can help raise standards with this small step. Also, you won’t receive any duplicate CVs ever again if the agencies involved stress firmly who you are and simply ask if they have been sent by another agency or ever applied in the past..... Saving you time! Legally, you are ONLY required to pay a fee to the company that sets up an interview for you and the above measure will prevent any agency stating that they have any case against you ever!!

Posted: 18th March '10