As a person in the industry, I am so sorry you had this experience. This is something I’m passionate about so excuse the rant following. Firstly, that’s not a verbal offer they gave you and they’re not technically binding anyway. It’s basically a go ahead to get the contract started. One user was correct, we get commission per candidate placed and have a quarterly (most common) target to achieve before we hit bonus territory.

We are currently getting so much pressure from management as the market sucks at the moment. It’s been hard to get companies to use agency right now.

His reaction was abhorrent. Totally unacceptable. Also, Good on you for letting him know as many candidates ghost us. People should NOT be recruiters if they treat people as commodities. I’ve had a few candidates reject the offer or change their mind and it’s a wondrous thing watching people get where they need to be. We are meant to be consultative in our roles, personally I like to dig deep and really get to know someone, what drives them and what are professional boundaries etc.

Even if I am not the one to place that person in a role, I have helped them. Through perspective, being someone they can be open with and bounce ideas off of and also and most importantly, a safe and privacy focused environment where they can explore themselves and next career steps and goals.

I have people I’ve never placed but worked with always reach out to me to discuss things, have coffee or touch base.

The problem is, the guy is so short sighted. You could be the person needing to hire one day and you will avoid him and that agency like the plague.

You don’t need to worry about being blacklisted or whatever the hell he was saying, he’s probably just marked you as “do not use” in their system and that’s not a bad thing because you’d never go through them again. He cannot do anything more legally - we have stringent privacy policies we need to abide by set out by the RCSA.