My colleague is actually my mate who I've essentially employed and we're running a two person headhunting firm. I posted earlier in this thread about his performance, but to his credit he's worked harder, better and is starting to
get it now.
I just wish a few things would go his way. Through candidate idiocy and lack of preparation he's missed out on two really quite straight forward placements, resulting in the lose of 30% of his annual target, as well as few other processes that simply haven't gone his way in the final round.
Last night he got
****ed hard. I came in after post-voting drinks to see an email from one of his clients. His biggest placement this year - in a totally new and quite exciting area of the industry - quit yesterday after 5 weeks' of employment at this client. Gutting. We worked so hard on this, it was a really tricky close and now the candidate received a massive offer from an interview process he'd had earlier in the year. I don't blame the candidate, financially it was a much better offer, but it just means my colleague isn't getting a break whatsoever. It's also cost me five figures.
If we wanted to we could keep the entire recruitment fee, as our terms state we can, but we'd be screwing ourselves and our client at the same time and that's no way to build bridges. The client has allowed us to source a replacement candidate to attempt to avoid having to refund the fee - it's going to be tough though as it's late in the recruiting year, there aren't an awful lot of candidates around right now and also the firm are pretty poor payers. I told my mate not to worry about, it certainly wasn't his fault and it won't have any negative impact on the client, our firm, his employment and so on. I just feel so gutted for him.
This is after a few things had gone well for me at work and we'd just moved into awesome, but not inexpensive, offices. Bah!