Three recruiters contacted me for the same job via LinkedIN! Is this normal?

Could you share your opinion about the following situation: in the last two days, I have been contacted by three distinct recruiters via LinkedIn. They sent me the very same job description. It's unlikely that the employer hired three HHs to fill in a single position, so it looks like they simply took it from the employer's website. I searched and found the job description on beyond.com

Could you explain what happened? If the opening is publicly available, to me it means the employer didn't want to involve HHs at all. Then why those three guys decided to get involved?

There are two possible answers to your questions, but unfortunately neither will paint these “recruiters” in a favorable light.

Possibility #1:

The client did indeed give out the mandate to three different firms, in addition to posting the ad for the position on various sites.

Some clients do this in hope of getting a wider reach by tapping into as many possible candidate sources as possible. What they sometimes don’t realize is that most recruiters do not even take the time to re-write the job description and come up with their own creative ad. They copy & paste it onto the same job boards and spam all candidates matching certain keywords on LinkedIn. The savviest of candidates will do exactly what you did – search the description on Google and find out which company is hiring. Unfortunately most get turned off by being bombarded with the same job offer and end up not moving forward at all. These lazy and unprofessional practices certainly don’t help anyone.

I feel compelled to share an anecdote. Recently we came across one of such copy & pasted ads a well-known Montreal-based recruitment firm was running. They replaced the client’s name with the word “Company” throughout the ad, which resulted in the following sentence: “To find out more about Company, please visit our website: http://www.Company.com/aboutus. “

Possibility #2:

You might very well be right in that the hiring company in question did not even mandate any of these recruiters to assist with the search. Recruiters sending out a job description they pull from a website is becoming a widespread practice. It is a desperate move but undoubtedly one we have heard about from clients on numerous occasions. A job ad gets blasted out and if a potentially suitable candidate “bites”, the recruiter will take the resume, remove all identifying information and “market” the profile to the prospective client. A client of ours told us that one recruitment firm in particular sends him upwards of 100 resumes on a monthly basis. They never met and never mandated the firm with a single search, yet the influx of resumes is never ending.

On a separate note, I have to clarify that inMail spamming is not headhunting. LinkedIn offers extensive training to hiring managers and recruiters on crafting these inMails and sending them out en masse. This is nothing more than an equivalent of an email campaign. True headhunters build their reputation on relationship building – we pick up the phone and reach out to prospective candidates, we network actively and we conduct thorough in-person interviews.

Hope this helps shed some light!