In the staffing and recruiting business, money is a very sensitive topic. This is because of how often these businesses will have to constantly worry about one of their clients refusing to pay them. For more than one reason.
However, the biggest problem that staffing and recruiting firms have to deal with are back door hires. What exactly is this problem and how does it affect the business as a whole?
What Are Back Door Hires?
If you’re in the staffing and recruiting business, then you’ve heard of this more than once. Simply put, back door hiring happens when one of your clients hires a candidate without informing you. What happens is that you’re paid nothing for finding a candidate for your client. You don’t get paid, and your candidate is then stolen from under your nose. This is a problem for everyone involved.
You as the business owner will not only lose money from the fee but also have to go through the difficult task of deciding what to do after the fact. This usually leads to you suing the offending client. Sometimes you might even need to sue the candidate for agreeing to be hired behind your back.
For the offending client, they’re going not just going to have a guilty conscience hounding them but also a lawsuit. This is the most common response to this problem and it can be quite an effective deterrent.
For the candidate, they’re going to also have to fear being sued themselves. They also have to deal with the fact that they have to work in a constant state of instability because of how they were hired in the first place.
No one wins in this situation and the best thing that could happen is that a back door hire doesn’t happen in the first place.
What Can You Do When It Comes to Back Door Hires?
There are quite a few things you can do when it comes to making sure that you minimize how often a back door hire can happen. There are ways to prevent it and things to do when it does happen. We’ve put all of them together into a compressed list that you can use right now to make sure that you keep back door hires at an all-time low.
Build Trust With Your Clients
One of the most important things to have when working in this type of industry is trust and communication. You need to ensure that you stay in touch with your clients so that they’ll be more obligated to give you information and updates on the candidates you’ve presented to them. You’ll know whether they’ve decided to hire the candidate you’ve presented or not and if they’re lying, you’ll be able to catch the problem early and not several months down the line.
You also have to remember that it isn’t just your clients that you should be building trust with.
Build Trust With Your Candidates
As was said earlier, trust and communication are important factors in business-like staffing and recruiting. This also extends to the candidates you are presenting. You might think of them as commodities to be sold off to other companies. However, that type of thinking will only make it easier for them to decide to accept a client’s offer to directly hire them without your input.
Don’t just think of them as commodities and think of them as your partners in the business. Without them, your business wouldn’t be much of staffing and recruiting business. So make sure that you earn their trust and respect by giving them what they need to land the jobs they want and they’ll end up hesitating to accept that back door job offer.
Make Sure That You Have Documents and Records Organized and Ready
Documents and records are important in any business. Even more so when it comes to the staffing and recruiting business. This is because this lets you know who was presented to which client and whether you should proceed to go after a back door hiring client. Awareness and early recognition are essential to catching a back door hire early and which client is also most likely to do it.
Lawsuits
Lawsuits are your bread and butter when it comes to fighting against back door hires. The mere thought of getting sued can be something that can deter any would-be back door hiring client. It not only makes them more liable to pay the fee they owe you, but they’ll also have to spend time and money on fighting the suit that they’re in. The best part is that most of the time, it’s the staffing and recruiting business that wins. Around 80% of the time in fact, especially if you follow the next tip
Hire a Collections Agency
Who says you should handle a backdoor hire case on your own? Collections agencies like Back Door Hires make sure that you get your fee from your offending clients. Sometimes even without needing to throw a lawsuit their way. This is because most collections agencies will have years of experience collecting fees from offending clients. They also provide tools for staffing and recruiting agencies that help them prevent and catch offending clients.
