B.C.’s hot job market is making it tougher for employers to find staff and while that should be good news for recruitment companies, many executives are doing the hiring in-house because of bad experiences with headhunters.
The province leads the country with year-over-year employment growth hitting 3% and its 5.9% unemployment rate is the lowest in the country. B.C. was the only province to post job growth in June.
Recruiters say that Metro Vancouver is fast becoming an employee’s market after about a decade of being an employer’s market.
Despite warnings from recruiters that hiring through word-of-mouth and internal vetting is dangerous and comes with the expensive risk of making the wrong hire, some business owners are so frustrated with the unregulated recruitment industry that they are willing to take their chances.
Vancouver Litigation Support Services principal Eileen Finnegan told Business in Vancouver that she paid a recruitment agency a fee to find an employee and when the hire was made, the person did not show up for work on the first day.
She had to phone the agency to find out what happened and was told that the employee had decided to take a different job. Finnegan said she was still on the hook for the upfront recruitment fee even though no employee actually started work.
“One horror story I had was when we hired a bookkeeper using a recruitment agency,” added Rising Tide Consultants owner Bert Hick.
“Within a year, we found out that she was forging my signature on cheques. She wrote cheques to herself and did creative bookkeeping, so we fired her.”
He filed a police report, but the evidence was insufficient for the Crown to recommend charges.
However, after he fired the employee, he checked her employee file and found glowing reference letters. Hick phoned one of the people who vouched for the employee in a letter and the person told Hick that he had had “challenges” with the employee.
A second reference was from a company for which Hick could find no record and, to this day, doubts that it exists.
“Having known [the employee], I recognized the language in the letter – the verbiage, dialogue and way it was written – it was exactly as my employee wrote,” Hick said.
“So, she forged her own reference letter.”
A representative of the employment agency that Hick had hired admitted that no one at the agency had checked references, so Hick was refunded the $10,000 to $15,000 that he had paid as an upfront fee.
Miles Employment Group president Sandra Miles was not involved in Hick’s situation, but she defended her industry by saying how hard it can be to confirm an employee’s capabilities by relying on references.
(Miles Employment Group president Sandra Miles' agency is licensed by the B.C. government's Employment Standards Branch to confirm that its practices adhere to privacy and labour laws | Miles Employment)
“People don’t respond to reference requests a lot of the time and, sometimes, the references that are given aren’t valid,” she said. “References can be co-workers and not a direct report.”
But Hick has other beefs with the recruitment sector.
For example, he’s critical of the way recruitment agencies charge upfront fees before searching for suitable candidates and then poach workers that they have already placed at other firms.
Hick added that when a recruitment company convinces a worker it has placed at one firm to change jobs, it ensures it gets more business because the first employer suddenly needs to find another new employee.
“We now run our own ads on Craigslist to see if we can find people that way,” he said. “Or we hire based on word of mouth.”
Miles said employees are free to seek other work and that hiring someone always comes with the risk that the employee will leave.
“I would never [poach] workers,” said Miles, who has been in the industry for decades and has owned her firm for the past 13 years.
“It’s important for clients to know who they are dealing with and to do their own due diligence. There are a lot of recruitment agencies out there that aren’t licensed. They’re working out of their homes. They haven’t built up a database, and they haven’t invested in resources to properly deliver on recruitment methodologies.”
No external agency regulates the sector, and the province’s Human Resources Management Association’s role is education and advocacy.
The B.C. government’s Employment Standards Branch licenses recruitment agencies, which pay annual fees and are interviewed each year to confirm that operations adhere to privacy and labour laws.
The province leads the country with year-over-year employment growth hitting 3% and its 5.9% unemployment rate is the lowest in the country. B.C. was the only province to post job growth in June.
Recruiters say that Metro Vancouver is fast becoming an employee’s market after about a decade of being an employer’s market.
Despite warnings from recruiters that hiring through word-of-mouth and internal vetting is dangerous and comes with the expensive risk of making the wrong hire, some business owners are so frustrated with the unregulated recruitment industry that they are willing to take their chances.
Vancouver Litigation Support Services principal Eileen Finnegan told Business in Vancouver that she paid a recruitment agency a fee to find an employee and when the hire was made, the person did not show up for work on the first day.
She had to phone the agency to find out what happened and was told that the employee had decided to take a different job. Finnegan said she was still on the hook for the upfront recruitment fee even though no employee actually started work.
“One horror story I had was when we hired a bookkeeper using a recruitment agency,” added Rising Tide Consultants owner Bert Hick.
“Within a year, we found out that she was forging my signature on cheques. She wrote cheques to herself and did creative bookkeeping, so we fired her.”
He filed a police report, but the evidence was insufficient for the Crown to recommend charges.
However, after he fired the employee, he checked her employee file and found glowing reference letters. Hick phoned one of the people who vouched for the employee in a letter and the person told Hick that he had had “challenges” with the employee.
A second reference was from a company for which Hick could find no record and, to this day, doubts that it exists.
“Having known [the employee], I recognized the language in the letter – the verbiage, dialogue and way it was written – it was exactly as my employee wrote,” Hick said.
“So, she forged her own reference letter.”
A representative of the employment agency that Hick had hired admitted that no one at the agency had checked references, so Hick was refunded the $10,000 to $15,000 that he had paid as an upfront fee.
Miles Employment Group president Sandra Miles was not involved in Hick’s situation, but she defended her industry by saying how hard it can be to confirm an employee’s capabilities by relying on references.
(Miles Employment Group president Sandra Miles' agency is licensed by the B.C. government's Employment Standards Branch to confirm that its practices adhere to privacy and labour laws | Miles Employment)
“People don’t respond to reference requests a lot of the time and, sometimes, the references that are given aren’t valid,” she said. “References can be co-workers and not a direct report.”
But Hick has other beefs with the recruitment sector.
For example, he’s critical of the way recruitment agencies charge upfront fees before searching for suitable candidates and then poach workers that they have already placed at other firms.
Hick added that when a recruitment company convinces a worker it has placed at one firm to change jobs, it ensures it gets more business because the first employer suddenly needs to find another new employee.
“We now run our own ads on Craigslist to see if we can find people that way,” he said. “Or we hire based on word of mouth.”
Miles said employees are free to seek other work and that hiring someone always comes with the risk that the employee will leave.
“I would never [poach] workers,” said Miles, who has been in the industry for decades and has owned her firm for the past 13 years.
“It’s important for clients to know who they are dealing with and to do their own due diligence. There are a lot of recruitment agencies out there that aren’t licensed. They’re working out of their homes. They haven’t built up a database, and they haven’t invested in resources to properly deliver on recruitment methodologies.”
No external agency regulates the sector, and the province’s Human Resources Management Association’s role is education and advocacy.
The B.C. government’s Employment Standards Branch licenses recruitment agencies, which pay annual fees and are interviewed each year to confirm that operations adhere to privacy and labour laws.
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