Early this morning, I received a call from a recruitment agency, RW. The last I’d heard from one of their “recruitment consultants” was quite a while ago and I hadn’t put in an application for any of their advertised positions since then. So the call was quite out of the blue and at first I was puzzled as to why this recruiter was quizzing me about a company H I used to work for. So I asked.
It turned out that this recruiter had seen a job advertisement company H had put out and wanted the inside goss on the company from a former employee before he approached them. He asked all sorts of questions, like why I’d left the company, what I liked about working for them, what the company culture was like, what sort of personality type would be a fit for this company, who are the people working there, who’s in charge of the hiring there and if there was a direct contact number I could give him.
I’d seen the job advertisement and had a good idea who would be involved and what the job entailed even though I had no interest in the job itself. He was fishing around for client leads and I was not at all interested in helping him out. I haven’t had a positive experience with this recruitment company and I certainly didn’t know this recruiter. Nonetheless, I’d answered a couple of his questions, painting a nice if somewhat generic picture of company H. I felt no inclination to give him any names or numbers.
So here’s the thing. If the people on this recruiter’s recruitment team had treated me better when I was dealing with them as a potential candidate, I would have been more forthcoming with information (although I still wouldn’t have provided a number because of confidentiality issues). As it is, I think company H would do better hiring directly than doing business with this agency.
