US Recruiters - Once Again Beware of UK Agency Recruiters
I'm an in-house TA lead for a startup and just got conned into doing a fake interview with a hungry UK agency recruiter. I had a suspicion it could be a fake role when I took his call because in his outreach message he mentioned that it was for a confidential client but he gave enough specific details where it could have been plausible. I got more suspicious when I saw that he'd worked in the UK for 10 years before coming to the US.
On our call he immediately started juicing me for info like the headcount of our company, my compensation, comp structure, what areas of our business we're growing. It was so transparent. I kept redirecting him to learn more about the role he'd reached out to me about and the mysterious client company. BTW I used to be on the agency side and used to do confidential work for clients but this guy was hilariously bad at dodging questions where I tried to narrow down more about the clients' area of the industry - I don't think he's ever worked on a confidential search in his life. At a certain point, maybe 10 minutes in after ineffectively responding to basic clarifying questions about the client company/their maturity/the role I think he realized the jig was up and seemed to run out of things to say.
I decided to put us both out of our misery and thanked him for his interest in my background and ended the call early. Beware of Linkedin messages peddling "Senior Talent Acquisition Partner (GTM & Corporate Functions) for a Global AI-first B2B SaaS organization."