Get It in Writing Before Anybody Does Anything

Had something happen this week that made me immediately go and update my recruiting agreement within the HOUR.

A company I placed reps with had them start training and onboarding….but WITHOUT any sort of signed contractor agreement in place.

When I asked them about it they just said “That’s just how we’ve always done it. The contract comes later.”

EH.

That’s nice. But not going to work for me…or for reps reading this if you’ve got your wits about you.

This is bad news bears. It’s bad for the business owners too. I’ll get to that.

If you’re a rep and you’re doing training, watching modules, sitting in on huddles, going through onboarding, you are WORKING. And good luck proving what you’re owed for that work.

You are giving your time and energy to a company. And if there’s no signed agreement defining your compensation, your scope, your terms? You’re not unprotected, per se, but good luck proving what you were promised.

You’re operating on scattered conversations and a prayer that both sides remember things the exact same way.

If you’re a business owner and you’re onboarding people without a signed agreement you are asking for a problem. Because the second something goes sideways, there’s no documentation of what was agreed to. It becomes he said, she said.

Not having a written agreement doesn’t mean you don’t have an agreement.

For the naysayers in the back, VERBAL contracts are legally enforceable in all 50 states. That means anything said on a Zoom call, in a Slack message, in a text, during onboarding, all of it can be held against either party.

“Oh we told them on the call they’d get X leads per week.” “Oh they said they’d be available by 9am.” “Oh we mentioned the commission structure would change after 30 days.”

All of that counts. Legally.

So the problem isn’t that there’s NO agreement. The problem is that there’s a SCATTERED one. Bits and pieces living in recordings, messages, and memories. And when something goes wrong, both sides are pulling from different conversations to prove their point.

A written agreement doesn’t just protect you. It ORGANIZES you. It puts everything in one place so nobody’s guessing, nobody’s misremembering, and nobody’s pulling a “well technically on that one call you said…”

That’s why I don’t care if you have one agreement or two. I care that you have SOMETHING signed before work begins.

Because otherwise you’re operating with invisible terms that are way harder to enforce or defend. And that’s a mess nobody wants to clean up.

Is it illegal? In some states (California, New York, Illinois), actually yes. But even where it’s not technically illegal, it’s just bad practice. It’s sloppy. And it signals to the rep that you either don’t have your house in order or you’re trying to protect yourself.

Look if you want to have a two-phase process where there’s a preliminary agreement for training and then a full agreement for live work, fine. Have two agreements. But having ZERO? That’s a liability waiting to happen.

So I added a clause to my agreement: if you hire someone I place, the contractor agreement must be signed within 7 days of the verbal offer or before training begins, whichever comes first.

No exceptions. No “we’ll get to it later.”

Protect your reps. Protect yourself. Get it in writing before anybody does anything. Not that hard people.