Case Study: HireChecker Back Door Hire Service for Goodwin Recruiting

Goodwin Recruiting are a coast-to-coast recruiting agency serving the entire United States. They have over 130 recruiters in 35 states and over 80 cities. Their recruiters know and focus on local markets as well as geographic markets where they have strong networks and personal connections. They have been in operation for over 20 years – listed by Forbes as one of the Top 150 professional recruiting firms in the US in 2020.

Their range of services include professional recruitment for: Executive Search, Hotel & Restaurant, Finance & Accounting, Senior Living & Healthcare and Manufacturing & Engineering. Goodwin’s clients range from single, independently owned operations to large, publicly traded organizations.

Recruitment for the hospitality industry is fast-paced with a quick turnaround on filling vacancies. Even though Goodwin have close and regular communication with both candidates and clients, inevitably there are occasions where the candidate is employed without them being informed. This is often a genuine and unintentional oversight by the client. It is known in the recruitment industry as a back door hire.

Checking for back door hires is time consuming

The COO of Goodwin Recruiting, Scott Gaba said; “We do have an in-house process for checking back door hire cases but it takes time and the main priority of our staff is filling vacancies. It’s inevitable that some cases are missed which of course means lost revenue.”

Goodwin initially tried using a back door hire finder service from a previous provider to support them, but after using the service for a year they had not found any cases.

“We were convinced that back door cases must be occurring, so we decided to try a different service. After searching the market we found a company based in Europe who met our criteria with a very good proven track record; Sterling Debt Recovery.”

Sterling specialises in debt recovery for the recruitment sector, and provides a back door hire search service called HireChecker. Following initial conversations it was agreed that Sterling would run a search on data which had already been processed by the previous supplier, to see if they could find cases where the previous supplier had found none.

Understanding the hospitality recruitment sector

One of the factors that make back door cases hard to find for Goodwin is the multiple brand names used by hospitality businesses such as bars and restaurants. Goodwin may have a contract with the group holding company, but a candidate may be employed by any one of the many brands within the group. It was agreed that a list of the multiple brands would be provided with the data so that Sterling could search for candidates being employed by any of the relevant brands.

“Sterling took time to understand our business. They realised that to get the best from our data they would need to search for employment of candidates by both our clients and their multiple brands. After we provided the data Sterling came back to us with results within a week. To put that into perspective it would take us months to search the same amount of data in house.

They found 2 positive matches in the data, along with the underlying proof.  Whilst this does not sound like a high number it does equate to a reasonable amount of revenue which we would otherwise not be aware of. It took minimal effort from our side to provide the data, and the fact that Sterling work on a ‘fee per find’ basis means that there was no risk of losing money on the search.”

Goodwin now works with Sterling to check their data on a regular basis. Every quarter they send 12 month’s data to Sterling for checking. Of course, this means much of the data is re-checked multiple times. This is important as a client may employ a candidate months after the initial introduction, and proof of that employment might take time to surface.

“Running this regular checking process with Sterling is quick and easy for us. It means our staff can focus on filling vacancies, and it gives me peace of mind in knowing we’re not losing revenue to back door hire engagements.”