The Recruiter Honeypot

If a certain action would mean no one works with you then that action isn't rational, right?

When you talk about finders fees, then yes it would stand to reason that an agency would want to get as many of those as they can but they have to do so in such a way as to not appear to supply flaky people.

Agencies also generally place contractors and in the case of a contractor they ideally want to place the worst worker as high as they can. And when I say "worst" I mean "worst at negotiating for salary". That is, they'd like to hire you out to a big bank for $1k/day and convince you that $200/day is a lot of money so they can pocket $800/day on you. If that sounds bad, I've heard of worse arrangements. In any case, whatever they get the contractor in they're going to want to keep them there as long as possible so they can continue to earn off them.

If you want to stop the agency who placed with you from poaching your permis then you should insist on paying the finders fee over some time period. This avoids the need for immoral and unenforcable "no-poach" contracts and but gives the recruiter incentive to keep the employee in place. Especially if you arranged payments so that payments get larger later in the employment cycle.

Hmmm, maybe someone should make an agency and try this model. :) But if you do be careful because companies will try to flip it the other way: e.g. fire and re-hire the employee early on to avoid further payment (which is probably why agencies demand the fee up front now).

It can also be political. Companies want to hire cheap foreign labor but are forbidden to if they can find native workers (various EU countries have this) so they'll advertise a job with bad conditions and low pay and then after not being able to fill it for some time they show it as evidence of skill shortage.

And your creative interpretation of my post is 100% wrong.

This isn't about an unhappy employee leaving because the job is crappy. Of course not. If the job or the environment is crap I'd be the first one to say that they probably ought to leave.

I am also deeply offended by your use of the term "slave". Nobody has used this term. Not one person has even implied it. I certainly have not. It is a despicable and desperate measure to sensationalize something that has, in no way whatsoever, implied such a condition exist or is desirable.

My post, and the scenario that it referred to, was very narrowly focused on the case where an agency YOU HIRE to help you find talent turns-around and proceeds to attempt to poach the very talent they helped you find just a few months after they got onboard. That is scummy and, in my view at least, absolutely justifies a no-poaching agreement WITH THE AGENCY YOU HIRED TO HELP YOU FIND TALENT.

Other than that, if another company is going to reach out and offer your employees a better deal (whether that means more money, a more interesting project or better working conditions) so be it, that's the free market and nothing should impede that at all. Even if other agencies reach out and convince the employee to leave a week after he/she came onboard, that's OK.

Again, the point here is very narrowly defined around the issue of a head-hunter that YOU hired turning around and poaching employees you just got done paying them a fee to find. That is a very different issue, isn't it?

In order to fully illustrate the damage done I simply highlighted that there are huge costs involved in hiring and employing someone, particularly through a head-hunter, and that it is wrong for them (the head hunter) to then turn around and try to steal people away from you.

After a reasonable and mutually agreed-upon period they can do whatever they want. In the example given in the OP's article that period was 18 months. That's fine.

To be ultra-redundant: If someone other than the agency you hired manages to pull someone --anyone-- away from you, that's fair game. You can do that to others as well as they can do it to you. The issue here is with an agency that is supposed to be working for you.

Thank you

good points on the communications side - something I can easily let slide

Very interesting read full of good data and some interesting takeaways (especially about LinkedIn).

One thing I wonder about is given how boilerplate and sparse the honeypot's blog was, how little information there was to go on, and how uninspired the self-description was, I can't help but wonder if the good recruiters were the ones who didn't bother contacting him.

As a side note, I'm also confused as to why the metric for a good recruiter was figuring out that the profile was a fake (kind of in line with Peroni's comment above). Or was it considered good that he/she chose to use the phone as a recruiting tactic?