I will find you and I will invoice you

Years ago when I was working for a recruitment agency, I had a candidate who we will call Phil.

We spoke quite a lot as we were regularly getting briefed on roles where Phil fit the profile but he never seemed to get the job. Often called in for 1 or maybe 2 interviews but didn't get offers.

One day Phil looses his job and becomes available for freelance work and we get him into a 2 month contract pretty quickly. He sends through timesheets weekly for payment. Things are normal.

But once this contract finishes, we can't get hold of Phil anymore. He doesn't respond to calls or emails and has seemingly fallen off the face of the earth or even worse; he was ghosting me.

Months later I am randomly thinking about Phil one night and decide to see if I can find him.

His LinkedIn hasn't been updated and he hasn't been active on there for a while.

I head over to instagram and he's there but has a private account. Nothing on Twitter either.

Then I had an idea. I looked up the client on Instagram that he had been freelancing with.

And there it was.

A picture of Phil posted by the agency we placed him at with a caption about their latest hire. A month after he "finished" that contract.

So this client and Phil had teamed up to cut us out of the process to avoid paying a recruitment fee. If you haven't worked in or around recruitment you might not know that the terms of representation don't end when a contract ends and this is a normal thing to invoice for.

Temp to perm situations are really common so for us to not get paid and lose a candidate we had a good relationship with was a bit annoying to say the least.

The next day I called the agency and asked to speak with Phil who was in a bit of shock when he heard my voice. I congratulated him on his new role and wished him all the best. I then emailed the agency with our invoice which they disputed for about 5 minutes and then paid.

Now I know not everyone loves recruiters and might think that going into deep stalk mode and invoicing a client for this is typical bad recruiter behaviour. But the client knew the terms, they just wanted to get away with not paying if they could.

You don't have to like recruiters and you don't have to use them but if you do, you're going to have to pay them.