Moral, ethical or what?

I got up this morning to pay some bills, however I noticed an email this morning from Jason from the Semiconductor Jobs blog. So now I am writing a blog entry, as my wife would say I have just followed a "shiny object", she thinks all guys do it.

It is very nice to get emails, this in its self is a strange statement, as my work email account is overloaded with spam although I do not see most of it as I am using ChoiceMail.

I spent a bit of time at Jason's site and have to say it is an interesting experiment (his term not mine) which I hope is working. In short this is a job blog, a collective place for recruiters and candidates in the Semiconductor industry to communicate. Personally a great example of a social network within the big wide world we call the Internet.

Anyway back to the title of my post. Jason posed a question in September about a client who took referral's from a candidate but did not want to give the recruiter credit for the referrals. This is a very short summary so you should read the full text at his site.

I initially was going to post a comment but thought no, it needs a full post. The question Jason posies is both ethical and moral but might also be legal depending on the recruiter's contracts. In Australia I have been talking to many different client organisations who put recruiters in the same class as used car sales people and personal injury lawyers, not the best compliment. Infact this week I was being chased by a sales person who wanted some advertising, he called 3 times one morning and the client I was at still thought recruitment agents were worse! Now before I get done over by the recruiters out there this is a perception and as we all know perception is reality in the eyes of the holder.

There seems to be a general move away from using recruiters. I see this comes from two trends first the continued growth in job boards and secondly the low ROI received from recruitment agencies. Figures I was reading recently (of course I cannot find them now) show more jobs are now on jobs boards than in the paper. (Open to being corrected if this is wrong.) The ROI question I believe stems from low quality candidates being sent to clients vs what a client could get if they sourced directly. At the People in Business conference this week there were many comments about the movement away from supplier agreements with recruiters, is this a true trend in the market I do not know.

Given this I can clearly see what a client might want to circumvent the recruiter if they did not feel they were getting value out of the relationship. However it would be sad if the client was just using recruiters to get candidates (knowing they will not match the job but might be in the industry) through the door so they can then get referrals to then not pay for the sourcing process.

I hope this all makes sense, in reading the post it seems like a rant.

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