Are recruiters blanket black-listing people?

bfa1509

I work in the medical device industry in Galway. I am currently employed in a company but have been looking for work for the last few years. I wanted to see if anyone shares the same experience as me when it comes to recruiters and the influence they have on your chances of finding work.

I usually prefer to apply direct to a company due to negative experiences that I have had with recruiters in the past (i.e. repeated and lengthy phone calls during and after working hours, asking whether interested in jobs unrelated to agreed preferences or jobs way outside the agreed preferred locations, the empty promise of a good negotiated salary or lack of promised interview feedback after an unsuccessful interview and also the cut off of communication after an unsuccessful interview. I've also dealt with some who were just simply rude or aggressive workers). I'm not saying it was all negative (but it generally mostly has been)

I have noticed that after job seeking through recruiters that, for a period of time afterwards, I find it really hard to get responses from most (if not all) companies. Then after a year or so I try again and get a huge amount of responses from companies looking to interview me.

So I looked into whether recruiters have a blacklist system for people even just for their own internal benefit and it turns out it is a very real thing:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dreaded-recruiter-blacklist-does-exist-you-karen-huller-cprw

An internal blacklist is fair enough because it stops them from wasting their own and their client's time. But do recruiters circulate their blacklists to other recruiters and even to a circle of companies?

I think this would be very unfair. Could anyone shed some light on this or if you have a similar experience?

Irish_Elect_Eng

Seriously :-) that is a real stretch to explain your recruitment experience.

A click-bait article by a recruiter in Philadelphia, where the practice is illegal under US law.

Rest assures, No there is no secret conspiracy to black-list you.

The most likely reason for your experience is probably as follows:

• Company approaches recruiter.
• Recruiter provides your CV to company
• There is now a contractual relationship in place, if the company hires you they have to pay the recruiter.
• You send in a CV the company ignores it as they can only deal with you through the company that sourced the CV, even if you are applying for another role.
• 12 Months pass, the company now considers that the contractual relationship has lapsed and they can consider your CV for a role.

Note:

Most of the Med.-Dev. companies in Galway have a single tied recruiter for direct positions and they are the go-to for many indirect positions also. The companies will often only expand their search after having exhausted a candidate search with their tied recruiter.

It is critically important for future prospects not to piss off these tied-in recruiters as they genuinely have the best opportunity of getting you the job,metrics to fill on getting high quality candidates and their costs are usually lowest to the companies compared to other recruiters as their fees are agreed in bulk.

scamalert

no point in worrying about black lists or not - go into any recruiters linkedin drop message if your account is sound they will want to add you on.

made my cv public on one of the most popular sites for recruiters and got flooded with offers 2-3 calls a day,until the point that got fed up since they ask what role your looking etc,salary and when asked about job give bare minimum description,up to the point where ive edited cv to put down if recruiter only intrested in x jobs and y location,and noticed trend that eventually they back off -simple reason your cv on job sites goes outdated as other people put new ones in thus they prob dont bother looking 50 pages back,but noticed when doing update or loading up new cv same show starts again.


Anyway point is in finding good recruiter which i managed to do,trough college and one knows that i can only do certain areas,and what positions id be qualified so if smth comes up always on email list and get proper job description wages location and can call for any info if want to,and get calls asked if interested to put forward cv even if position isn't perfect.

Thus now rather then taking calls whatever time someone decides to call,just ignore them-if see job that is of interest then try and put out cv for that position.Thus eliminating ones that just try to find whatever position they might think to fill without having done proper research on job or applicant.

So dont see point in getting upset,if rights skills choose direct email to company whenever you see positions of interest.

Do people move between companies much?
It could be an informal non compete cartel.

boardsuser1

Had a similar discussion not too long ago on recruitment agencies.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057654079

boardsuser1

scamalert wrote: »

no point in worrying about black lists or not - go into any recruiters linkedin drop message if your account is sound they will want to add you on.

made my cv public on one of the most popular sites for recruiters and got flooded with offers 2-3 calls a day,until the point that got fed up since they ask what role your looking etc,salary and when asked about job give bare minimum description,up to the point where ive edited cv to put down if recruiter only intrested in x jobs and y location,and noticed trend that eventually they back off -simple reason your cv on job sites goes outdated as other people put new ones in thus they prob dont bother looking 50 pages back,but noticed when doing update or loading up new cv same show starts again.


Anyway point is in finding good recruiter which i managed to do,trough college and one knows that i can only do certain areas,and what positions id be qualified so if smth comes up always on email list and get proper job description wages location and can call for any info if want to,and get calls asked if interested to put forward cv even if position isn't perfect.

Thus now rather then taking calls whatever time someone decides to call,just ignore them-if see job that is of interest then try and put out cv for that position.Thus eliminating ones that just try to find whatever position they might think to fill without having done proper research on job or applicant.

So dont see point in getting upset,if rights skills choose direct email to company whenever you see positions of interest.

I'd be interested in this

Mrs OBumble

Deleted User wrote: »

Do people move between companies much?
It could be an informal non compete cartel.

I don't know if cartel is the right word, but there certainly are operating practices which prevent moving between companies in some cases.

Eg if recruiter A is the main supplier for companies B and C, then they may have an agreement that employees of B will not be put forward for vacancies in C and vice versa.

There are also informal "no poaching" agreements between IT managers in companies in Galway (said managers are all friends because it's a small market). I know people who had to take a contract in Dublin in order to get out of the company they were in.

Irish_Elect_Eng

In the Galway Med-Devices industry, it is quite common to transfer between the various companies. It is one of the best ways to advance your career in a particular field if there are no suitable paths upwards from your current role. I have a couple of people in my team that over the years have left to go to one of the other companies to advance their careers and have been rehired into more senior roles once we had a suitable opportunity.

But hiring people back is very dependent on how and why they left :-) When a manager knows that the person is moving on for a positive reason, opportunity, promotion, change in role, etc. they are usually welcomed back when a suitable role comes up. (Folks rarely come back to the exact same job) After all they have invaluable experience and will have a very short time to get up to speed and become productive. If they left because they did not fit in, or there was performance issues or badmouthed folks on the way out, well that is a whole different story, organisations remember, if not HR then the hiring managers and colleagues.

Yes, all the HR manager know each other, through professional organisations, training courses, the grapevine, etc. , the same can be said for most senior functional leaders and professionals. But in these large, highly procedural, american companies, the hiring processes are in general, fair, ethical and legal.

bfa1509

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

I don't know if cartel is the right word, but there certainly are operating practices which prevent moving between companies in some cases.

Eg if recruiter A is the main supplier for companies B and C, then they may have an agreement that employees of B will not be put forward for vacancies in C and vice versa.

There are also informal "no poaching" agreements between IT managers in companies in Galway (said managers are all friends because it's a small market). I know people who had to take a contract in Dublin in order to get out of the company they were in.

This is definitely true. It also applies to engineering managers (in Galway anyway).

Irish_Elect_Eng wrote: »

Yes, all the HR manager know each other, through professional organisations, training courses, the grapevine, etc. , the same can be said for most senior functional leaders and professionals. But in these large, highly procedural, american companies, the hiring processes are in general, fair, ethical and legal.

I agree. I have had nothing but positive experience with HR departments within the companies I have applied to. It's the 3rd party recruitment agencies who I have the problems with.

reallyrose

I work in recruitment and there's no black-list policy between agencies. If nothing else, agencies don't usually talk to each other. It's a very competitive world!

There's barely internal blacklists, to be honest. I might keep a mental note if a candidate was dreadful. In technology, you'd honestly have to be the worst person ever to be blacklisted. In 3 years, there's literally been 2 candidates I would never work with again. In both cases, they were verbally abusive to me.

If you repeatedly don't turn up to interviews, that might be an issue too.

Few companies will have informal policies not to hire from other local companies. The skills shortage is so acute, you can't afford to lose people.

If you're not getting responses from applications, there might be something else going on.
Are you applying to the right level/type of jobs? Is your salary requirement way off base for the market? Have you had a large number of jobs in a small amount of time? Job-hopping is becoming more common but several stints shorter than 18 months is a bit of a red flag (unless you're a contractor).

The point above about applications to companies and applications to the same companies through a recruiter is valid. Companies like to feel you care about them and if it looks like you don't know where you're applying, that can be an issue.