IT recruiter calls out rival over sneaky phone antics
A suspected rival posed as a candidate to glean info on employers, recruiter suspects
A channel recruiter has spoken out about what she believes are the sneaky tactics of a competitor who posed as a candidate to glean important information about a role.
Zoe Chatley heads recruiter Wallace Hind's technology division and focuses mainly on the distie and vendor space, although she also recruits for some resellers.
Earlier this week she took to LinkedIn to call out the actions of a suspected rival after receiving what she believes were phoney telephone calls designed to trick her into divulging information about the firms for which she is recruiting.
When speaking to CRN, she declined to name the rival she suspects made the call as she has no way of being certain of their identity, but said her suspicions were aroused immediately.
"We had two calls - the first one, [a woman] called me up regarding an opportunity I was working on for a managed print services business," she said. "We don't advertise who the client is and give minimal information. The giveaway was, when she phoned up, the first thing she asked was 'who are you recruiting for?'. Naturally, I will always tell my candidates who we are recruiting for, but it's further down the line once we have established a connection and we know how committed they are."
Chatley explained that the caller remained insistent that she wanted to know the name of the employer, and when she eventually agreed to send over her CV, it contained no contact information, which fuelled her suspicions, along with the fact she did not appear to have a LinkedIn page. When Chatley eventually got through to the woman on the phone, she said it was obvious she had rumbled her due to her nervousness and desperation to end the call.
Another phone call later in the day to her colleague sparked further suspicions. Although the call appeared to be more genuine than the first suspicious one of the day, the caller appeared to drop themselves in it when giving their email address which belonged to a rival recruitment company.
"The shock filtered through and we just thought 'crikey!'," said Chatley.
The IT channel has been suffering from a skills gap for a number of years, and other recruiters have spoken out about the difficulty of finding suitable candidates for roles.
Chatley said the skills gap and changing face of IT recruitment could be the cause of the tactics.
"[Junior recruiters] are either being taught to phone recruitment agencies to get this information, or they are desperate and think 'I need to find out where these jobs are coming from - I will pretend to be a candidate'," she said.
"In the tech channel, it is a massive market and there are enough roles for all the competitors in the space."
She said recruiters are being squeezed because a lot of companies are bringing their recruitment capability in-house, meaning there can be less work for external agencies.
Wallace Hind recruits for a range of industries including technology, manufacturing and packaging. The IT section of the business currently accounts for about 10 per cent of the business, but it expects that section to double in coming years thanks to its recent success.