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Submitted by dozrman on
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I am currently unemployed. I have been working with a great staffing agency who has arranged a phone interview with a large well-respected company for a contractor position. After the interview, I contacted the staffing company to get the hiring manager's address (there have more than one offices in this city) and a physical address. The response from the staffing company was that I would have to send it to them and they would forward to Supply Chain who would then forward the physical thank you note. I was curious to hear from anyone else if there was a resistance to sharing physical mailing addresses. Although I find this response odd, I will not let it discourage me from sending the thank you note but was both surprised and sad by this reaction.

Has anyone else run across a similar situation?

timrutter's picture

I'm afraid that's totally normal with external recruiters. They want to manage the communications so there are no side deals and they get paid.

There will be more than one way of finding the person. Google and a couple of phone calls and you'll get them.

Tim

Consultant2001's picture
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I googled the hiring managers I interviewed with ... Wrote and addressed the letter and then let the recruiter know that I sent the. The letter as a courtesy so that there would be no ambiguity... Personally at the end of the day ... It is my name on the job not the hiring or staffing company... So it's up to me to find it. 

letting them know is just so they "feel" in the loop. 

my 2 cents. 

As a side note... After all the imetviews were over and the company was making their decisions, I wrote the recruiter a thank you note as well. (And had to google him). 

mrreliable's picture

There are formalities to be followed when working with staffing agencies. For obvious reasons, staffing agencies need to control the hiring process. If they didn't, they would seldom be paid.

It will be interesting whether the staffing agency continues to work with you considering you ignored their directions.

The relationship with the staffing agency is not the only issue. Assuming the company you interviewed with has a good relationship with the staffing agency, there's a good possibility the person who receives the thank-you note will recognize the protocol breach, and the message may be one that you didn't intend to send.

DaniMartin's picture
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It's a sad day indeed when the kind act of saying thank you is considered a "protocal breach" and reason to terminate a relationship.

Gk26's picture

I know some for whom this happened - she sent a thank you note and the relationhip was terminated. If one of my vendors terminated a relationship with someone whom I was going to bring onboard in a similar manner, I would really question prodeeding using them.

mrreliable's picture

In this case a thank-you note is not an act of kindness like a sympathy card for a friend who has lost a loved one. In this context a thank-you note is 100% a business action done 100% for business reasons in an attempt to establish a business relationship with an employer. There is zero personal motive for sending thank-you notes in this situation.

I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I'll bet lunch that the contract with the staffing agency addresses issues such as this, and the orignal poster agreed to make contact with the potential employer only under specific conditions.

As I stated before, staffing agencies need to keep strict rules regarding communication between their clients and potential employers. If they didn't have strict controls half the population would stiff them somewhere between the initial contact and the offer of employment.