How to ask if a company if they are contracted with a recruitment company

Question

Here is my situation (and from what I gather this is a common worry, at least with this recruitment company): I went on a recruitment company's website and applied to a couple of their positions. I got a call from the recruiters for the positions and they sent me information on the companies and said they sent my profile to the companies. This was last week. Since then I have not heard from anyone at either of the companies, nor have I heard anything from the recruiters.

Now after having applied through this recruiting company, I have read some rather unsavory rumors about this recruitment company, most of them having to deal with them scraping online job postings and sending resumes unsolicited. So now I am a bit worried that my resume may have been sent to the companies unsolicited and that my reputation may be tarnished with them, but I am also worried that they may have sent my resume solicited and if I apply directly with the company it will portray me poorly or "look bad" in some other way (recruiters often warn me of this).

My question: how do I approach a company to see if they are contracted with a recruiting company? And if they are not, would it be possible to explain the situation in such a way as to not tarnish my chances at an interview when I apply directly with the company?

Answer 1

You didn't tarnish your reputation by using this recruiter. You tarnished your chances. A third party recruiter will add a 30% markup (if not more) to any resume he sends in.

And it doesn't matter if you apply in person now, or if you even explain your situation, having received the resume from that recruiter, the company will still be legally obligated to pay that commission to him/her.

In the future, do not go through third party recruiters unless they have a solid reputation to begin with, or unless they're using an email address from the company they're recruiting for (which implies they have an exclusive relationship with that company).

This is not to blame all third party recruiters. Some are absolutely excellent. It's just that the barrier to entry to be a recruiter is so low. All it takes is a telephone line and access to a computer, which means anyone can become a recruiter at the drop of a hat, which also means, the job market is constantly flooded with tens of thousands of bad recruiters (that have no business being recruiters in the first place).

In the future, do not first go through HR either, find an employee/manager to direct your resume to (preferably in the department you want to work in), address it to him/her, and he will forward it to his HR department. I used to work in HR as a student intern, and believe me, those resumes forwarded from an internal employee got special attention, if only for the fact that HR didn't want to be blamed for having lost them, so we had a special checkbox for employee-forwarded resumes when we scanned them into the database, and we also placed them on top of the pile of paper resumes when we forwarded those paper resumes (or their photocopies) to the relevant hiring manager(s).

Answer 2

I think you are stuck on "unsolicited". Some recruiters will have a direct line with a hiring manager, and said manager may have been waiting on external factors (budget, office space, etc) for quite some time to green-light the act of finding contract OR permanent employees. As this time approaches, the recruiters will start sending resumes. Are they "unsolicited"? No. They're the result of a protracted exchange between recruiter and hiring manager.

If you apply directly AFTER having given the recruiter permission to submit your resume, you're probably going to have both resumes go right into the trash because no company wants to deal with the trouble a double-submission can cause.

It's only been a week. "Stuff" (smile) happens. Managers (and people they need to perform interviews) go on vacation, emergencies happen, and priorities change in no time at all. Rather than focusing on ONLY these opportunities and stressing yourself out, just keep looking! It's always better to have more irons in the fire. You've done as much as you can right now. TRUST, I know the waiting game sucks but I guarantee you that as soon as the smell of real money is in the air, the recruiter will call you back.