I recently had an interesting discussion with a recruiter from DMA Canada who has a great deal of experience placing information professionals. As part of his routine practice he requests written consent from me before forwarding my resume to any potential job prospects or professional connections. Even when I give him verbal consent, he will always remind me at the end of the phone call to please send him permission in writing about what was just discussed.
Although he has high ethics and a well-defined process for recruiting people, he sometimes runs into conflicts with other recruiters that don’t adhere to the same high standards. One of the primary conflicts occurs when he submits a candidate’s resume for a position only to find out it’s already been supplied by another recruiter. More often than not, the competing recruiter was able to supply the candidate’s resume by copying and pasting it from his/her LinkedIn profile.
As a consultant, who occasionally works with recruiters, this is an interesting scenario even though it’s never happened to me personally. On the one hand, professional information posted on LinkedIn, if designated as public, is available for anybody to see and do what they want with it. As a consultant, this can often work in my favor when I have recruiters finding jobs for me. Typically the recruiter will call or email me to tell me about the position and then if I’m interested, the process begins. On the other hand, it would feel awkward for me to work with one recruiter, give him/her consent to forward my resume only to find out another recruiter submitted my information without telling me about it.
It’s important for me to know where and how my information was supplied. Most contracts have non-compete clauses, which means I’m not permitted to apply for the same one with more than one vendor. Even though either scenario could result in me winning a contract, sometimes I prefer to work with certain recruiters because they offer better service, better jobs, and better rates. The whole package counts.
After having discussed this with the recruiter in the morning, that same afternoon I received an email from LinkedIn informing me of changes made to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. I checked out their blog to get a summary of the changes and discovered a video entitled “Who owns your content? You do.” While I think it’s admirable that LinkedIn feels so strongly about users’ rights to control their own content, it doesn’t really address the other major challenge. Once content is available publicly on a social media platform it’s free for the taking to be used in any number of ways, with or without the users’ express consent.
I’m not sure that there’s really a good solution to this, except to make a point of only working with recruiters that have a code of ethics and obtain my permission before submitting my resume for a potential contract.