2 Headhunters offered me the same role. How to behave

Hi everyone,

I had a chat with an headhunter about a possible role and he told me he would present me to the firm as a possible hire.

A couple hours later, another headhunter, from a different firm, calls me and illustrates me an opportunity, I started asking him a couple of questions and turns out he is proposing me the same opportunity.

How do i behave? Do i act as if i didn't know that the two are proposing me the same job? Do i choose the one that came to me before?

Any suggestion is appreciated.

Thanks

6 Comments
 

If it is the same job then be transparent and tell them you have been approached already for this role. Because your interview will probably be with the same person. There is nothing for you to gain by hiding it from any of the headhunters. 

 

I hate when this happens. It generally happens with one of those small recruiters that I’ve never actually gotten an interview with and one of the legit ones. I would steer more to the legit firm as they are more likely to have a larger slate of interviews available.

 

Smaller recruitment agencies often work through the same wholesale agency (the "overarching agency" on the PSL) or find out about the role through the same channel (always ask an agency if they are exclusive for this role, department or even client). If a candidate is submitted twice or multiple times the agency who approached you first has the right to earn the fee. Multiple submissions, as rightly said above, is not a positive aspect at all. Several clients have a system in place that would even disqualify candidates that are submitted many times for the same role by multiple agencies.

There are even cases where all agencies can see the candidate submissions and shortlist on the HR portal anyway, so at that point you'd have only wasted time for everyone involved.

 

One way you can deal with this issue is to ask recruiters that contact you if they have been given a mandate by the fund.

Funds want to avoid these types of headaches so will often give a recruiter exclusive mandate to recruit.

That doesn’t stop a hungry recruiter from trying to show their worth by hunting down potential talent but usually without an explicit mandate.

 

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