Is there any sort of SOP for this? Do you tell the employee’s manager as a heads up, or simply ignore it and keep it to yourself?
Way way more often, the case is either flat out bad management or misalignment of the employee expectations with management and/or organizational vision which is way way harder to quantify so thus, nobody does. In the latter, there are often performance issues anyway.
All that said, I’ve worked for companies and have also seen people fired just for simply “looking.” Usually this is a sign of clear toxicity in the company culture because the management ego was hurt when they found out their employee was disloyal. We all know the company would just kick an employee to the curb at the first sign of trouble so it’s unfair to expect anything else from an employee.
Literally the only benefit that I have gotten is to be paid on a weekly pay cycle instead of monthly one, which is a dubious benefit to be honest, anyway.
They've sent me to job interviews for skills I don't have, lied to clients about me and wasted everyone's time.
This is a horrible rent-seeking class of no-good people and they shouldn't exist. They should have honest jobs and work for a living like many other humans have no choice but to do.
I've seen plenty of contracted people from such firms be let go due to incompetence, to boot. These people are useless.
I'm not going to beat around the bush on this I'm afraid.
If they truly offered nobody nothing, they wouldn't exist. What they offer is convenience - to the hiring manager. He can just ring a couple of recruiters and have a bunch of people to interview in a couple of days. In theory, the company's HR should provide this service to him instead, but some companies are too small to have HR, and many companies' HR is incompetent or dysfunctional and will not find the right match for the job.
Yes, the ~20% they charge on an ongoing basis is a lot for this service, but the hiring manager does not care, as long as he has money in the budget. So, you could say recruiters take advantage of the managerial class not really working to benefit the owners of the company, and being very loose with their money. They found a way to exploit a weakness of the corporate structure, like many other corporate vendors do - big and small, from mom'n'pop stores which deliver vegetable baskets, to your Microsofts and Googles.