This is SOP for about half the recruiting firms in town. Best way out of it is to remove yourself from Quux's interest. You can try asking to have your resume removed from their files, but that's no guarantee. Worst case, you need to call Quux in about a week, and lie and tell them you found a job, preferably at some small shop they know nothing about (make up a name if you have to). They'll ask for a phone number, tell them "you know how it goes, no phone yet" but you'll call as soon as you have the number. Call them from home in the evening to make it look good. Problem is, as long you're actively looking and haven't called them off, they'll spoil many of your submissions. Most places will simply throw your resume away if they see duplicate submissions (or used to, before the labor market got so tight). For your question, it's best to keep those things straight upfront, but even then, that's no guarantee. The sweatshop recruiting shops will pass the resume around, and while you may have made an arrangement with one recruiter, there's no guarantee a different recruiter won't send it out. Best bet is to find out who's good through your network of friends and associates, and only work with those folks. - Dave -----Original Message----- From: John J. Trammell [SMTP:trammell at nitz.hep.umn.edu] Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 10:39 AM To: tclug-list at lists.real-time.com Subject: [TCLUG] advice [OT] Hello LUGgers: I'm a newbie in the job search arena, and could use some advice on how to avoid a certain situation in the future. Say, hypothetically speaking, that you have a friend that just got a new job at company Foo via job-finding company Quux (rhymes with "sucks", as in "rat bastard fuckers die die die") Jobfinders Inc. This friend encourages you to apply for another position that's open at Foo; you do this, and in addition you ask the boys at Quux to see if they can locate some position for you. You find yourself fucked, because what does Quux do but send your resume off to Foo? Now Foo wants to hire you, but Quux says that Foo owes them some sort of finder's fee, even though you have a contact of your own at Foo, and really didn't get anything from Quux. Foo won't hire you because this fee is exorbitant, and why the hell should Quux get dime one anyhow? So how do other people manage this situation? My thought is that I should have made some agreement with Quux from the beginning that they had to have my permission to send my resume to Foo; once this was done, Foo was "theirs" and if they found a job there, they were entitled to the fee. This would leave me free to search on my own at Bar and Baz, Inc. Any other ways out of this? Regards, J _______________________________________________ tclug-list mailing list tclug-list at lists.real-time.com https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list