Collaboration and consent
A practical guide to candidate consent in agency collaboration
Split placements are normal and useful. What is not normal is a clear answer to the question of who told the candidate, what they told them, and what the candidate agreed to.
General information. This is general information about how systems and processes work, written for Australian recruitment agencies. It is not legal, tax or financial advice. Where a decision turns on the Privacy Act, on licensing, on tax or business structure, on your contracts or on your obligations to candidates, take advice on your specific circumstances.
The situation
Agency A has a client and a role. Agency B knows someone suitable. Both would rather do the placement than not. The candidate is often the last to be consulted, and frequently finds out that a second agency is involved when they receive a call they did not expect.
This is a privacy problem before it is an etiquette problem. Disclosing an identified individual’s information to another business, for a purpose that individual has not agreed to, is a decision with obligations attached. "Everyone does it" has never been a lawful basis for anything.
Stage one: nothing that identifies anybody
Everything before the introduction can be done without disclosing a person. The shape of the experience, the location, the availability and the commercial terms are enough for another agency to decide whether they are interested.
No name, no contact details, no CV, no current employer, and nothing so specific that it identifies one person by elimination. "The only female CFO at an ASX-listed miner in Perth" is identifying, whatever fields were left blank.
If a collaboration never gets past this stage, no personal information has moved. That should be the normal outcome for most enquiries.
Stage two: specific, informed, revocable
Before anything identifying moves, the candidate agrees to that specific disclosure. Specific means: this party, this role or this purpose, this information. A general permission collected at registration is not consent to a disclosure that had not been contemplated then.
Informed means they can see what would actually be shared. "We may share your details with partner agencies" describes a category; it does not let anyone make a decision.
Revocable means they can withdraw, and that withdrawal does something. If the answer to "can I take that back" is that the information has already been emailed to three people, the consent was theatre.
The record that matters afterwards
Keep what was disclosed, to whom, when, for what purpose, and on what basis. This is the answer to a candidate asking who has their CV, and to a client asking why two agencies presented the same person.
Keep it per disclosure rather than as a flag on the candidate record. "Consented: yes" tells you nothing six months later about which of four introductions it referred to.
The duplicate-representation problem
Two agencies presenting the same candidate to the same client is bad for everybody, and the obvious fix, checking each other’s databases, is exactly the thing neither agency will ever agree to.
A narrow check can answer one question without opening anything: has this receiving agency already got this person? It should tell the receiving agency they may already hold them, and nothing else. Not which other agency is involved, not what is in anybody’s record, and not anything that could be used to enumerate a database.
The distinction is between a service that answers a yes/no question about your own data and a service that lets you look at somebody else’s. Only the first is acceptable.
Language, which is not a small thing
Nobody owns a candidate. Nobody sells, buys, transfers or holds one. Agencies have relationships with people, and agreements with each other about placements.
This matters practically, not just morally: contracts written in ownership language describe something that cannot lawfully be transferred, and they read badly in a dispute, or in front of the candidate they concern.