Sending a stranger's CV to HR

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

In general I am an outgoing person and tend to meet a lot of new people. I work at a software company and some of the people I meet in public are software engineers. I am a senior engineer and architect and currently run a team at my company.

Our company, like most software companies, is most definitely short on good engineers and the other day on the train I met two young people in their last few months of university who were very interested in finding work. I know that we are specifically looking for this exact profile. They asked me for my card and sent in CVs the next day.

I forwarded them to HR, saying something like "I was waiting for the train and met some engineers. Here are their resumes. Are these interesting for you?"

I got this message back from HR and am debating with myself what to think about it: "What a nice place to recruit new people =)".

I have a feeling this is a passive aggressive note implying I should feel bad about promoting the company. In general I am planning to ignore the comment (at least, not respond by email) but it makes me wonder how should I interpret this and if I should do something differently?

The two people I met, in my mind, have excellent profiles. Looking at the one CV, it's very solid. Maybe I am too open-minded, but is it reasonable to consider them, or is it a black mark on me or the candidate just because I met them in a two minute conversation while switching trains instead of a two minute conversation on a recruitment day? Why would this be worse than applying via our public website?

manpreet 2 years ago

In general you should only refer people that you know are decent candidates, since their performance has an impact on your image.

In this case you have pointed out that you don't know these people, which is the right thing to do. It's up to HR now to figure out if they are good candidates or not. They should realize that you cannot vouch for their skills.

I would not think of the response you got as a passive-aggresive note at all. I would just see it as a light-hearted comment.