Whether you call them back-door hires, backdoor placements or unauthorised placements – or whether you don’t call them anything at all because you’re not aware of them, the backdoor hire can affect your bottom line, break trust with candidates and damage client relationships.
What is a backdoor placement?
This is where a candidate sent for interview by a recruitment agency gets the job without the client letting the agency know – so the agency missed out on its fee. There’s another way that this can happen – when a temporary worker is hired permanently by the client without paying the agency’s temp to perm fee.
Sometimes this happens accidentally, sometimes the client is deliberately trying to save themselves the cost of an agency fee, but many agencies simply aren’t attempting to track and/or reduce the potential risk of back-door hiring. What’s most frustrating about this is that the best recruitment software UK makes it straightforward manage relationships to minimise this type of risk.
There are many ways to reduce the risk of back-door hiring:
- Create contracts with clearly defined transfer fee times – the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 make it clear that the agency contract with the hirer gives them the option to extend the worker’s assignment, that the hirer hasn’t taken on this option and that the hirer must offer the worker a permanent role less than 8 weeks after the end of their initial assignment – or less than 14 weeks after it started if that’s later
- Send all candidate submissions via CRM platforms – in fact this is one of the biggest warning signs of a client who’s a bad actor. Recruitment CRM for agencies is the simplest and easiest way to keep track of your candidates, and when a client asks for CVs by email, it may be a warning sign
- Educate clients about the risks of non-compliance or accidental hires – this is a part of relationship building that many consultants try to duck, but it’s vital to ensuring that they recognise the risk of a behaviour that they might otherwise consider to be trivial
- Follow up on older submissions, especially if a role reopens – your applicant tracking system UK should allow you to keep an eye on both your clients and your candidates … and it’s healthy relationship building behaviour to do so
- Document everything candidate related – create a digital log. Use your candidate database software as your central portal for all communications; don’t let recruitment consultants keep their communications with candidates in other formats; ensure calls and emails are logged on the system. Good recruitment software for agencies allows you to record all this information so that should you need to provide evidence for your case, it’s all ready in the system.
By removing this operational black hole from your system, you don’t just ensure that you’re being paid all the fees you deserve, you’re also boosting your customer relationship processes and giving both clients and candidates solid, demonstrable evidence of your interest in them and your ability to help.
