One of our consultants is a little grumpy today. Yesterday, he was asked by a hiring manager to escalate the recruitment for a contract role with urgency and to send a short list of candidates over as soon as possible.

So he pulled out the stops and asked other consultants to stop working on their own vacancies to help source, screen and shortlist people to send across to this hiring manager. The feedback on the quality of candidates was excellent. Then came the email: 'We have decided to go with an internal applicant.' Now, there is nothing wrong with considering internal and external applicants together.

In fact, I recommend it, because then, when you make a decision, you have made the decision after having benchmarked the market. But it's such a waste of our time when you don't tell us that there are internal candidates in the mix, because we give a different message to our candidates.

It's not that we don't work on the role or present candidates; it's that we make sure that our candidates are aware that they are competing against internal employees. Worse, in this case, the hiring manager was less than truthful when asked who was being considered. They specifically told our consultant that the only other candidate under consideration was an external candidate. In the end, the consultant is not in a foul mood because he didn't fill the vacancy – he is filthy because he was lied to (blatantly so) and because now he has to go back to a shortlist of candidates and let them know that they are unsuccessful because the hiring manager was always considering an internal applicant for the role and, in the end, their details were used as a 'comparison'.

Think of it like this: it's like you being asked out on a date, only to be sent a text to be told that the date is cancelled, and in fact there was never going to be a date because, actually, he's already married to someone else. Yeah really, it's just like that.