[michaelt]

Well, a lot of recruiters present themselves to employers as helping with their recruitment problems, rather than exacerbating them.

The "rational" thing for a recruiter to do is to post fake jobs with huge salaries to jobs boards to get in resumes; and to offload filtering for quality onto clients so as to get more volume through; to shop resumes around clients in descending salary order so lower paying places only get candidates rejected by other employers; and as soon as the contingency fee comes through, to call the employee at work and try to get them to hop somewhere else so you can collect another contingency fee.

If all recruiters did this no-one would work with recruiters - businesses only work with recruiters because those recruiters claim they aren't going to act in this ("rational") manner - they claim they're going to look out for the client's interests.

For a recruiter to make this claim while simultaneously proving it false shows a bit of cheek, and obviously makes one doubt the sincerity of the claim.

[flyinRyan]

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).

[phillmv]

Everything you mention I kind of consider par for the course. How would you even know if your recruiter wasn't doing that? To expect otherwise, I think, is a little naive.

The economics of the recruiting business, as you pointed out, reward behaviour ranging from predatory to scummy. The best you can hope for is the guys who are merely sharks, and not scumbags.

Yet, the negative aspect you mention, is still contingent on being able to convince people to leave your company. Having talented people leaving your company is a sign you're doing something wrong; you either have a flaw you need to address or you shouldn't be concerned in the slightest.

My thesis goes, if all that was keeping someone behind was an unexpected offer out of the blue you had already lost them.

[michaelt]

I'm not in recruitment myself, and I agree that ideally you want your employees not to leave even when contacted by a recruiter!

I assume the idea behind refusing to work with recruiters who have been unethical in the past is to create a disincentive, in the hopes of reforming the economics of recruiting so you can get recruiters who will work with you rather than against you.

You'd imagine there would be some recruiters who would aim to behave ethically and to cultivate a reputation for being ethical, as that reputation would be valuable to a recruiter in terms of getting clients.

The one time I was job-hunting I saw some pretty unethical stuff - I once had a recruiter e-mail me a programming test along with a solution another candidate had submitted, and almost every recruiter asked for a summary of technical interview questions so they could brief other candidates. I would have thought using unethical recruiters would actively hinder your recruitment process - so there'd be no market for their services.

I mean, evidently it doesn't work that way, but I think that's the aim of refusing to work with certain recruiters.