How one candidate’s innocent email to 600 recruiters ended up causing a major dispute in the City last week
In these straightened times, when new job vacancies are apparently down 42% year-on-year, it might seem advisable to target your job application to a few select recruiters who specialise in your area and will work with you on a semi-exclusive basis to help you find a new role.
This is not what candidate X did last week.
Opting for the CV-hosing approach, candidate X sent his forthright application email (‘I am interested in finding a job in the banking sector in the UK. Please find attached my CV. Further information available upon request. Looking forward to hearing from you.’), to around 600 financial services recruiters in the City of London.
It could have all ended there: recruiters receive hundreds of emails; a generic application citing no role in particular is unlikely to get very far.
Except candidate X didn’t BCC. The other 599 recipients and their email addresses were publicly visible to all the recruiters who received X’s application.
Spotting an opportunity to advertise a vacancy at his firm, one of the recruiter recipients (recruiter Y) opportunistically replied to X and the rest, saying: “Thanks for introducing us all,” and mentioning that he was hiring experienced recruitment consultants.
It could have ended there too.
Except another recruiter (recruiter Z) took exception to recruiter Y’s email and accused him of spamming all the recruiters on the list. An argument by email ensued, with recruiter Z insulting recruiter Y, and recruiter Y producing put downs, such as:
“I’ll assume you are yet another public schoolboy who disappointed daddy by becoming a rec con (and lawyer in your dreams) and now has too much to say for himself.”
This prompted Z to claim he wasn’t actually a recruiter, but in fact a venture capitalist investing in recruitment firms who’d worked at McKinsey and recently completed an MBA at INSEAD and that Y would therefore live to regret crossing him. Unfortunately, Z was obliged to retract this claim and issue a public apology when it became apparent that his pseudonym coincided with that of a real recruiter, who was none too pleased that his name was being bandied 600 recruiters in the City of London.
The morals of this story are manifold: if you’re a candidate, don’tsend your application to hundreds of recruiters, certainly don’t forget to BCC if you’re emailing it to more than 1; if you’re a recruiter, don’t get involved in an email chain to everyone else in your industry; and don’t pretend to be something you’re not – even if it is intended to be merely humorous.
