When Is An Offer Letter Not An Offer Letter

One of the advantages of a blog is to be able to air dirty laundry about the staffing profession. There are a lot of good recruiters out there, but there are also a number of shady operators.

This is one of those stories.  It is true.

A recruiter sits down with a candidate for a Java development job, and after asking questions about background, projects, skills, and salary requirements, asks the very important question - "where have you already interviewed, and who else have you worked with?"

The candidate replies with a few companies, and then tells the recruiter that they have an offer letter in hand, so it's best if the recruiter organize any interviews as quickly as possible.

"An offer letter," the recruiter asks?  "If you already have an offer, it's going to be difficult to get you in somewhere else and get an offer before yours expires. Do you want that other job?"

The candidate replies that he has an offer letter from the staffing firm.

The recruiter pauses, and asks if the candidate has the letter on him. The candidate does, and the recruiter begins to read a 2 page offer letter from a competing firm. In the fine print of the letter, the company says, "Contingent on a successful interview and an employment contract, ____ _______ is hereby offered a position as a ____ _____ for the sum of $_______."

This takes the recruiter back a bit. He's never seen a pre-offer, offer letter before contingent upon a successful interview and an employment contract.  That's because there's no such thing as a pre-offer offer letter. Of course the firm would hire the contractor if their client wanted to use them.  What kind of guarantee is that?

Shady paperwork, often many pages in length, is a big warning sign for candidates.  Paperwork happens after a recruiter has found you a job.  Anything you sign before is a "leash" that the firm is using to make your behavior confirm to their needs, instead of yours.

Comments

[Colin Kingsbury]

Maybe--but just to play devil's advocate, this is not altogether unlike a letter of intent or IOI that you see in all sorts of other transactions, and are not as a rule considered advantageous to either party.

The difference with that is that in a b2b transaction the two parties are on more equal footing in principle, but in practice I'm not sure that the informed, well-qualified, in-demand candidate is really all that much weaker. I would use a letter like this to negotiate for bonus, options, flex-time, etc. on top of the salary. Assuming that's not also in the fine print.