Has anyone encountered a high tech / sales recruiter who wants a signed contract forcing you to pay unspecified fees if you leave the position before six months is up? A friend of mine has, but it seems iffy to me.
That sounds more than iffy and I have never encountered it and I would never sign it. The headhunter probably has an agreement in which he or she won’t get some or all of the headhunting fee until the person has been in the position for 6 months. Someone leaving before then is just a risk they take and a cost of doing business. IT headhunting fees are pretty steep and run about 25% or more of the first year’s annual salary so that would be a lot to pay if the job was terrible and your friend left after a month. I doubt the whole thing is enforceable in any case but it does sound odd and risky.
I would agree that sounds weird. It should be a cost of doing business to the headhunter. I understand the headhunter is trying to protect their end of the deal because they may not get their 20-25% payout if the person leaves before 6 months, but that seems strange to penalize the candidate if it is high churn job that people have been leaving because of the brutal working conditions/jerk boss, which is why it is vacant.
I guess it’s a contract like anything else, and if the headhunter can get people to sign it, more power to him/her, but it must specify what the penalty payment is if the candidate leaves, and it should also specify the circumstances under which the penalty is enforced. That is, the candidate should not be penalized if they are laid off because the company has a sudden downturn/gets acquired in less than six months, and perhaps not even if the employee is fired. If the candidate leaves for another better paying position in less than six months, however, that seems like it might be reasonable for the headhunter to expect a payout.
If the amount is not specified, is the contract even legal? “I promise to pay you some amount you make up” doesn’t sound like it would fit contract law. If a formula is determinable (“X% of salary les Y% for each month up to 6 months”) it might be.
I agree - the headhunter’s job is to get a good fit from the client (the employer). Sounds almost like a conflict of interest if they recover any lost fee from the departing employee. Then they could double-dip by finding a second employee for full fee again.
I would say NOT receiving money if the employee quits is proper incentive for the headhunter to do the job properly, which is what they charge the employer big bucks for in the first place.
I have never heard of anything like that, from people I know who have used headhunters.
Not normal. This sort of thing is skeevy even for tech recruiters, who are some of the most loathsome pieces of shit since God invented used car salesmen. Run far, far away.
I didn’t want to say it outright but it is all true. If lying and manipulation were a college degree, most tech headhunters would be pulled from elementary school and just given a PhD to give them a head-start on their careers. Don’t insult used car salesmen with the comparison. It makes used car salesmen look bad.
The thing to keep in mind is that tech headhunters have an order of loyalty:
- (Officially) the company where the placement is made
- Themselves
- Their pet
- Casual friends
- The country of their origin
- Themselves
- Charities they like the thought of
- Themselves
- Favorite sports teams
- Less favored sports teams
- Cool TV shows
- Their parents
- You as a jobseeker
There are a handful of good ones out there but they are extremely rare. I have gotten the displeasure of working with hundreds of them and jobs through three. Only the ones that are both disreputable and incompetent make anyone sign paper acknowledging that fact beforehand.
“Ruunnn Forresst, runnn!”
At least once a week I get a call from someone on my work phone who tricks the receptionist into putting them through to me. They see my LinkedIn profile and call my employer to try and pitch me some shitty job.
A company pays a fee for each person placed. (As much as 25 percent of the salary.) This is very costly to them and it is not uncommon for a company’s contract to say that they want they’re money back if a hire does not work out before X amount of days. (IME it is usually 90.)
The reason for this is that in the tech field, many head hunters just pepper the market with resumes, and don’t do a proper screening. The target company’s reason for using a head hunter is to lessen the cost of hiring. The target company does not want to extend the money and effort looking for the people, validating their skills and doing the background checks. They expect the head hunter to do this. But many head hunters don’t have skills or the background to properly screen an applicant. The target company does not want to pay for a bad hire.
And so some head hunters will make it part of your contract that they get paid either by the company or by you, the person being placed. This places the risk on you.
The first time I encountered that I allowed it. The second time I came across it I told the head hunter that if the target company was so difficult to work for, that the risk was so high that I would leave, I did not foresee it working out and would not sign (I was in the wonderful position of not needing a new job, I was just looking for one.) The head hunter waived the clause.
(In neither case did I leave before a year.)
In no case would I ever agree to *unspecified *fees.
You’re kidding, right? 1. is themselves. The company where the placement is made comes in just above the jobseeker.
One time I asked a jobseeker why he wanted to leave his current job. He hemmed and hawed a bit, and finally admitted that he was perfectly happy there, but the headhunter who had placed him there had called him and told him he could get him a much higher paying job, and had tossed him into the interview circuit. Coincidentally, it was just over a year since he had been placed in that job, meaning the headhunter got to keep the entire fee. Our company shitcanned that headhunter within the hour.
Not to defend the headhunter, because you are right that most are pieces of shit that should be scraped from the shoes of society, but I have certainly known more than one tech employee who immediately started circulating their resumes after getting to a new job because they were always chasing a higher salary. In my line of work, I see this a lot with ‘information assurance’ types. In that case, these guys effectively always screw the headhunter because their skills are in high demand and they rarely stay anywhere for an extended period of time.
Meanwhile, I find headhunters to be pretty useful, because I have never met a single HR person capable of doing a decent job of screening resumes. True, we regularly get quoted a 20% starting salary fee, but they bring us legitimate resumes of qualified candidates, rather than our retard HR people who try to dump thousands of unqualified candidates on us and say “these are all ‘programmers’ just like what you asked for”.
None of my recruiters have insisted on this. If I leave the company within a certain amount of time, I have to pay back the moving and hiring bonuses, but nothing to my recruiter.
When my daughter was in high school, during the bubble, she had a job for a while with a sleazy headhunter. She sequentially called extensions at tech companies (at night) and wrote down the names of people from their voice mail message. She’d then look them up in the phone book and call them at home about jobs, using an assumed name. She often caught shit from their wives.
When headhunters call me I ask them right away what it is that they think I do. I’m visible enough in the field that a good headhunter can get my number based on my expertise. The ones who answer correctly I chat with, the ones who haven’t a clue I give the bum’s rush, since they are wasting my time.
BTW, the one headhunter I did use did a great job in difficult circumstances, and deserved every penny of my employer’s mnoney, so they are not all bad.
As for the OP, I’m sure people could do better with a legitimate headhunter. Sounds slimy to me.