Maybe the worst recruiter blunder ever?

I worked a desk as a recruiter for many years. And I was a pretty good recruiter too.

Not great, mind you.

Just good enough to have a lot of fun and make a bit of money.

I also made some monumental stuff-ups. And I don’t mean the odd lapse of judgment. I mean enormous mistakes. Colossal blunders that make me cringe to this very day.

Today I hope to exorcise my demons by sharing the worst balls-ups I made as a recruiter.

It was in London in the early 1980s, and the market was starting to boom after a severe recession. I was placing accountants from a pokey office behind Oxford Circus. Frankly, the whole industry was a bit of a circus in those days. Don’t get me wrong. It was a real, thriving industry. But it was largely unregulated. It was tough. It was fast. It was brutal, actually, but it was exhilarating too.

I loved the cut and thrust of it.

We interviewed people at our desks. We had job orders circulated from office to office by motorbike to get the information around the business faster. That’s right. No email and no fax. A good permanent recruiter often placed three or four people a week.

In those days, the recruitment process was undefined, and indeed, at the fast end of the market, you simply referred candidates to jobs you thought would suit them, based on the interview you had conducted with them, often that morning.

At the time it was routine to refer candidates to roles without their specific permission on that role or that client. It was all too fast. But, yes, that was the standard practice in accounting recruitment, London circa 1982.

As a result, we often placed people on the day they came in to see us. Clients often interviewed candidates based on our ‘telephone sell’ of their background. Often a resume was not needed at all!

Sometimes, however, the only way to secure an interview for our candidates was to send the client ‘CVs’, as we called them at that time.

And it was a bunfight to get your candidates included on the ‘shortlist’. It was truly a case of the quick and the dead because you were competing against many other recruitment firms, of course, but you were also in intense competition to get CVs to the client before other offices of your company, and also before colleagues in your own office! (Did I mention the environment was competitive?).

But all this is no excuse for what I did. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to say this, so here goes ….

I sent the resume of a qualified accountant, a delightful young woman, to her employer!

There it is. I did the unthinkable. I was moving so fast, that I quickly matched a job description with a candidate and put the two together.

And it was a good match too.

It was her job!

Did I realise my blunder? No. I was on to the next thing.

I found out by the client calling me.

“Mr Savage, did you send me the resume of Mary Candidate?” he said in a quiet monotone. “Oh yes, sir, I certainly did”, I gushed, thinking I was getting an interview and unaware of the horror about to unfold. “Well, this is just to inform you that I am her current boss and until now I was unaware she was looking for a new job. Thank you for this information.”

“Click”

The horror. The shame. The guilt.

I phoned her. Many times. She never took my calls. Never called back. In fact, I have never spoken to her again.

Her name is burnished in my memory. I did another Linkedin Search for her this week. She would be in her late sixties now. She is not there. Not under the name I knew anyway.

To be honest, I don’t know what happened to her or what the consequences for her were. Labour law was not nearly as supportive of the employee in those days, and she could easily have lost her job. At the very least, I put her in an awful position.

But in the long run, the whole diabolical episode did me a lot of good.

For a start, it brought me down a peg or two. It made me realise that there was a significant flaw in how we were doing things. (I was only in my early 20s, and we were being told, ‘This is how it’s done’.)

It also taught me the importance of care and process and reminded me of our duty to candidates and how attention to detail counts.

I never made a mistake like that again.

How about you? What is your biggest recruiting stuff-up? Your darkest recruiting hour?

Come on, please tell us. Tell your tale in the comments section below. The secret you never wanted to share.

You will feel so much better! 🙂

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