I’ve found a bob. Now what do I do?
What next steps should you take when you discover a back-door hire?
Imagine the scenario. Your agency has 50 dedicated and hard-working recruiters sending five CVs a week. Over the course of a year, this adds up to around 13,000 CVs.
That’s a lot.
Now imagine that five people in your business leave. Several months later, you discover that a candidate they sent to an open position has started working there. Well done candidate!
But it’s not celebration time for you. Because nobody followed up with that candidate and, as a result, your agency missed the fee.
Now, if you’re using manual methods to try and keep a handle on the thousands of CVs your recruiters send each year – let’s say tracking each CV or candidate in a spreadsheet – the chances are you might never even realise that you missed that fee.
Alternatively, you might be aware of it, but not have the time or resource to follow up.
Finding missed fees with bobcheck
If you’re using bobcheck, this story goes a little differently.
Yes, your agency missed the fee, but the bobcheck system quickly alerted you to the ‘back-door hire’ – so now you’re in a strong position to recover those missed earnings.
Looking for a reminder of what bobcheck does (and why you need it)? Read our ‘What is bobcheck?’ post here.
You’ve found a bob: What should you do first?
Before you approach your client to discuss the bob, we’d recommend running through this checklist:
- Do you have a candidate representation email confirming they were happy to work with your recruiter?
- Did the CV get sent with your agency terms?
- Are there overarching terms confirmed with your agency?
- Did you have interviews arranged through your agency?
- Did the candidate start within your standard representation timescales (typically six or 12 months)?
- If the candidate is a contractor, did they go BACK to your client after the initial assignment finished?
- If your recruiter left, did the client try and contact your agency?
- If there was a VMS involved at the client site, did your recruiter log representation of the CV?
- Are they an existing client or speculative account?
Going through this checklist should mean you’re confident that it’s appropriate for you to contact the client and begin a discussion about the back-door hire.
It also ensures you’ve got the relevant documentation to hand to prove (if you have to) that a bob did indeed occur.
So, what happens next?
How to discuss (and resolve) a missed fee
Every scenario is unique and specific to your firm; we know that client relationships can vary hugely.
We’d suggest the below as a useful starter for ten. You can then adjust to suit your own clients and situations.
- Call the client to discuss the issue, based on all the evidence you have of the back-door hire.
- Discuss the potential fee value missed and how to resolve.
- Consider how you’d ideally like to resolve the missed fee. It doesn’t have to be financial compensation if there are other ways for you to recoup value from your client. You can get a bit creative this:
- Do you obtain a retainer for a future role?
- Do you request access to three exclusive jobs?
- Do you take half of the fee for an exclusive job?
- Or do you simply invoice for the fee?
Of course, if your client doesn’t pay, or if you’re dealing with a previous client and the relationship has ended, you might have to go down a legal route to recover losses.
As some of you might have already experienced, this can be a long, painful process – so we’d always proceed with caution…
What to do next
Although recovering missed fees is important, it shouldn’t be your only focus.
With bobcheck, we want to empower recruitment agencies to dig a bit deeper and understand why a bob has occurred.
Often there’ll be learnings you can take from the experience – ways you can improve your internal processes and prevent back-door hires from happening in the future.
By automating the tracking process, bobcheck can free up significant time in your team – leaving you with more capacity to invest in your bob prevention strategies, team training and housekeeping.
Ready to discover bobcheck?
bobcheck can’t guarantee that clients will always repay your missed fees (wouldn’t that be nice!).
We can guarantee, however, that bobcheck makes finding missed fees faster and easier – and that puts you in a much stronger position when you need to reach out to clients to negotiate or discuss a resolution.
Designed for recruiters by recruiters, bobcheck is the only automated tool to identify behind-your-back hires and alert you to a missed fee.
We’d love to show you how bobcheck works and can make a difference to your business. Why not have a free, informal demo of the platform?
Alternatively, simply drop us a line with any questions, and we’ll be happy to chat.
