[liquidcool]

As someone who does contingency tech recruiting, I'm very curious how this plays out. I have a couple biases, mainly 2 decades in software engineering and a sense of ethics many recruiters would call "stupid." But I'll clear some things up in this thread.

First, I'm shocked this worked. Typically, recruiters send out "headless" resumes with the name and contact details stripped out, for candidates you can't easily match on LinkedIn or other resume databases. I assumed they were fake and consider it a form of phishing. I will add that this is not done by just lone recruiters hard up, but by many major firms. And they do it to me, too, which means they didn't even read the first line of my LI profile to learn we are competitors.

Contingency recruiting fees are well known in the industry. But I suppose if you were not a technical manager (or very inexperienced), and didn't run it past HR, this might happen. You might think, "how much could it be?"

While there is no contract in place, there are lawyers who specialize in collecting recruiting fees because so many companies try to get out of them even when there is a legit contract. So the threat of a lawsuit is real, and depending on the jurisdiction and the actual correspondence, they may be liable for something (IANAL).

Personally, the same ethical code that prevents me from trying to trap potential clients would also prevent me from lying to the recruiter. I'm sorry you were put in such an uncomfortable position.