Recruiter swears at candidate. Gutter press outraged.

Posted by Mitch on 13th December 2011

Many of you will have already seen the story about senior recruiter Gary Chaplin telling a candidate who had emailed his CV to some 4,000 recruitment agencies to “fuck-off”.

The Daily Mail and The Sun in particular seemed to be cheerleading the righteous indignation of the masses – however they did, unlike me, replace all or some of the letters with asterisks, thus further reinforcing their burgeoning status as the protectors of our moral sensibilities.

To ramp-up the recession-fuelled pitchforking, they referred to Gary Chaplin as a “£200K a year recruitment consultant” because as we now know, the amount of money someone earns has a direct correlation to how much we hate them when they do something wrong.

I wonder if a recruiter with a wife, two kids and a second hand Ford Fiesta earning £37K placing bricklayers would have attracted the same opprobrium?

What does surprise me about this story is how delicate the tabloid press are when it comes to censoring swear words. Is reading ‘f**k’ any less offensive than reading ‘fuck’? Is having this word entering your consciousness actually capable of causing you genuine offence? I reckon most people have been told to fuck-off hundreds of times during their lives and as a result have become desensitised to the term. In fact I’d go as far as to suggest that calling someone stupid is more offensive.

But the tabloid press, as always, prefer to play the ‘shock-jock’ role of focusing on the four-letter stuff. I’m a little surprised they didn’t accuse him of snorting cocaine off the buttocks of some Spearmint Rhino employees and setting fire to a few homeless people. Thinking about it, given that the name of the candidate is Manos Katsampoukas, I’m surprised The Mail didn’t champion Gary as a hero for standing firm against the tide of foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs.

More seriously, the aspect of this story I found most troubling is that Gary chose to deliver his rant to the candidate under the name of another recruiter – yet the press seemed to make very little of this. If I had Gary in an interview, that is the part of the story I’d want to get to the bottom of the most.

And yes, I would potentially consider hiring Gary as a recruiter.

His earnings alone suggest he’s reasonably good at what he does and having exchanged one or two comments with him on Twitter and having read an article about his views on social media, he came across reasonably well. OK, so he put in an email what 80% of us have said in our heads on those occasions when we get dumb job applications from candidates. We’re all human.

But using a fake name? That’s what troubles me the most.

So, what do you think? Does Gary still have a future in the recruitment industry?