UK 
United States
Jobseeking can be tough. Spending a considerable amount of time drafting cover letters and CVs, preparing for face-to-face interviews and completing in-depth research on the employer, there are a lot of things for candidates to remember.
In order to improve their personal jobseeking experience, some candidates may be inclined to use recruiters to fuel their job search, find suitable roles that match their skillsets and help them secure their job of choice. But what happens when a candidate is offered more than one job?
One recruitment agency – who has been blanked out of the LinkedIn screengrab – has listed some rather unusual requests within its pre to end client interview agreement. And in the event that a candidate turns down a job offer; the recruiter would expect them to pay £7,781 ($10,000) for the inconvenience of assisting them throughout the process.
This is outlined in the contract clause as: “In the event that if I breach the provisions of this agreement, I agree to pay the company as liquidated damages and not as a penalty a further sum of US Dollars Ten Thousand.”
The candidate contract also states that candidates should remain ‘exclusively available’ to the company for three business days starting from the date of the interview.
One LinkedIn user commented: “This is absolutely insane! How can they even think that this is okay to do…”
Another added: “Ugh I hate to think about what the client engagement terms include. No wonder the industry has a bad rap” (sic).
But, sadly, it seems that this is not the only occasion that a recruiter has tried to invoice candidates for turning down a job offer, after being successful with more than one role.
Candidate invoiced for wasting recruiter time
An anonymous reader penned on askamanager.org that they were in the lucky position of interviewing for two roles through recruitment agencies and then received offers from both employers. “Both roles were aware that I had another strong offer on the table, and negotiations started between myself and the two agencies.”
After a few days, the candidate made a decision and outlined their choice in an email explaining to one recruiter that the job offer that would be turned down. To the candidate’s amazement, the recruiter got in touch to “discuss the matter further and I declined”.
Then one thing led to another. “A month later, I received an invoice from the accounting team of the recruitment team – no other communication – just an invoice made out to me for £38 ($50) for a background check they had completed.
"I responded to the accounts team saying that I believed this cost was for their client, and as I had no relationship with them, it wasn’t an invoice for me personally (assuming it had been mistakenly sent to me as the subject of the background check)."
But, should recruiters charge candidates for deliberately wasting time on candidates with false CVs?
While it may be deemed a ludicrous suggestion that a candidate should pay a recruiter for turning down a job offer - because they are in the lucky position that they have been offered more than one role - where is the line drawn when it comes to charging candidates for fabricating CV information or blatantly lying about career history details?
Will Grashoff, Managing Director at OX Seven, previously told Recruitment Grapevine that he doesn’t think recruiters should start charging for this. He said: “I think that as recruiters, we have a duty of care to both clients and candidates.
"Our duty of care to the candidates is to ensure that we are clued up enough about the roles that we are working on to properly qualify and identify their skillsets and recognise whether they are appropriate or not.
“If someone is lying or extremely misleading on a CV, as someone who knows the subject matter, the role and the client, we should be able to identify and spot warning signs and a good recruiter - we should have that in our skillsets.”
Kevin O'Malley
Grant Mead
Paul Spencer