Rounding up the cowboy recruiters

Working in a busy software development outfit in west London, John was hardly surprised to receive a phone call from Microsoft's support operation chasing up an outstanding support call. What did surprise him was that the support person didn't have a reference number, nor did he have details of the person who had logged the call. Even more unusual was the request for the names and email addresses of every single person in the development department so that the call's originator could be traced.

You won't be surprised to hear that the call wasn't made on behalf of Microsoft, but was in fact an example of the increasingly creative methods employed by recruitment agencies to beef up their contacts databases.

Is it legal? Unlikely. Is it ethical? Even more unlikely. Whatever the legal and ethical implications may be, anecdotal evidence suggests this sort of underhand tactic is on the increase and the government is keen to clamp down before it gets out of hand.

New regulations introduced in parliament last month are going through the House of Commons and the House of Lords. This follows concerns that current legislation governing the way employment bureaus work is ambiguous and does not address undesirable practices.

Legal overhaul
The implications of the new Employment Agency Bill are significant. The bill is likely to result in the recruitment industry's biggest legal overhaul in 25 years. Not only will it clear up much of the ambiguity surrounding the rights of the individual, it will also protect the rights of agency workers, particularly temporary staff who work for employment businesses and who will gain broadly the same protection as other workers.

A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) said the regulations will be finalised over the next two months and are likely to come into force in late summer.

"We understand the Employment Agencies Bill is being rushed through by the government because CVs have gone to places where they weren't supposed to go," says Dave Ferguson, a director of online recruiter 1st-Wave.com.

Ferguson believes that although data protection has always been an issue in recruitment, the huge rise in the use of internet technology in the recruitment process has meant the potential for misuse has never been greater. "We've come across a number of situations, but candidates aren't willing to talk about it because it's embarrassing," he says.

Complaints to the DTI about online recruiters have increased by 20 per cent in recent months, and the spokesman admitted this had prompted the legal overhaul.

However, the new bill does not single out online recruiters, even though the proportion of agencies offering online services is growing dramatically.

Giving the industry a bad name
There's a school of thought that believes the proposed legislation marks a positive step to weed out those rogue recruiters who have already tarnished the name of the industry as a whole. "The new bill is quite specific and exciting in respect of some of the practices which aren't doing the industry any good," says Ferguson.

However, his praise is falling on deaf ears among some colleagues in the industry. Many UK recruitment agencies have dismissed the government's plans for revised regulation, preferring instead a self-regulatory approach. "There's no need for official regulation. It should be up to associations to take more action against their members," says Brian Lloyd, managing director of recruitment consultancy Spring.com.

"I don't know if self regulation is the answer," says David Bevan, head of strategic planning at Best People. "The industry has grown up a lot and there's a lot more professionalism these days, but the internet makes it easy for anyone to set up their own recruitment operation in a back room with a PC."

E ven the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), which represents the interests of half of the UK's recruitment companies, admits that its code of practice needs strengthening. It has pledged a new, more stringent code of practice to tackle recruiters carrying bogus jobs or duplicated ads, and those online operations which spam companies with CVs without applicants' permission.

"During the course of a year we probably receive up to 200 complaints," says Christine Little, external relations director for the REC. "Most are resolved very quickly, but we have publicly expelled people from membership and we will continue to discipline those who breach our code. At the end of the day, it's about ensuring that the services offered by our members are of the highest quality."

Clina Gathercole, a director in the employment law practice at IT law firm Kay Legal, says the new Data Protection Act, which came into force in March, places jobseekers in a stronger position regarding storage and use of their personal data. She said individuals whose CVs were mailed out to prospective employers without their permission would be able to sue for damages - not to mention distress - particularly in cases where their CV landed on the desk of their existing employer.

"Individuals might have the right to claim compensation if they've suffered damage as a result of any contravention of the 1998 Data Protection Act," says Helena Sims, compliance manager at the Data Protection Registrar.

She strongly suggests that individuals quiz recruitment agencies about their use of personal data as an initial means of safeguarding themselves. "The difficulty for individuals is that once data has been passed on to a third party, you can't take it back," she says. "In that respect, nobody can remedy the situation."