We had a really bad experience with an agency recruiter the other day.

It started with a cold-call and a resume to me.

The recruiter caught my attention with his subject line (implying that he and I had some previous relationship) — it worked. I opened this email:

Email-From-Bad-Recruiter-Phishing

…the candidate that the recruiter sent over was a Ruby on Rails engineer (not a PHP engineer which is what Ongig had advertised).

I told the recruiter so much.

And so he tried again with another resume (see email below).

 

Email-from-bad-recruiter-phishing-for-client-3

 

That’s when things got real interesting. The second resume he sent was for an employee of a client of Ongig’s.

The main problem we had with this was that the agency recruiter had contacted the new candidate and used Ongig’s name (without an Engagement Letter).

Ongig co-founder Jason Webster, a former agency recruiter, was so upset he phoned the agency recruiter and told him that representing Ongig without an engagement letter was not cool. Jason asked him to “cease and desist” on using Ongig’s name.

What did the agency recruiter do?

He hung up on Jason!

Finally, the recruiter had a couple of choice last words for me in his last correspondence (see the email below).

Email-from-bad-recruiter-phishing-for-client-4

And we wonder why agency recruiters get a bad rap.

Note: If you want to hear more horror stories about working with recruiting agencies, I found this good piece on “Black Hat Recruiter Tactics” at Nathan Hurst’s blog

 

 

by in Recruiters