Protecting candidate ownership when you work across firms
Consent, ownership claims, and duplicate detection — how to avoid the classic 'whose candidate is this' dispute.
The fastest way to sour a split-fee relationship is a dispute over candidate ownership: two recruiters submit the same person to the same employer, or a candidate-side recruiter feels their candidate was shared with an employer without consent. These disputes are almost always avoidable with the right process in place before submission.
Ownership protection starts with consent: a candidate should know, with scope and expiration, which employers and job orders their profile is being shared with. Blind profiles — where the candidate's identity is hidden until an employer engages — reduce the risk of a candidate being shopped around without their knowledge.
Duplicate detection is the second layer. Before a submission goes through, the system should be able to flag that a candidate is already engaged elsewhere in the network — without revealing who submitted them first, since that itself is sensitive information between competing recruiters.
Finally, disputes will still happen occasionally, and the goal isn't to resolve every one algorithmically. Material ownership conflicts should route to structured human review with an evidence trail — timestamps, consent records, and submission history — rather than being decided automatically by whichever system saw the candidate first.
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