No.6 – The Coalition – 47 Negotiation Tactics
Coalitions aren’t about friendship.. they’re about leverage.
The Weekly Walkaway highlights negotiation in its ‘good’, ‘bad’ and sometimes ‘downright ugly’ forms. Issue No. 119 (26th September 2025)
Happy Friday Walkawayers.. I know you’ve all been waiting.. fingers twitching.. drooling over the next tactic to drop.. and so here it is. The Coalition.
Competitors don’t usually play nice with each other. I mean, c’mon, it’s not good form to cooperate with another firm who is your mortal enemy.. Is it?
Well.. I learnt that there are no rules in negotiation.. and over the years I’ve come to appreciate that there are many opportunities where forming coalitions to improve your position is just bloody good sense.
Not sure if this story was my first experience of The Coalition but I know it sticks in my head as a time when I was party to the tactic and where it succeeded in re-balancing power.
And that, Walkawayers, is the reason for Tactics, remember.. To take power or the perception of power from the other party.
I’m taking you back.. way back.. to my early days in recruitment, and although exciting and very profitable.. it felt like the wild wild west at times.
It was a very competitive period. Some agencies were well known for undercutting others, actively stealing candidates, rewriting CV’s (without permission) and posting jobs that didn’t exist.
It was a time that gave recruitment agencies a bad name, for sure.
I was lucky enough to work for more professional outfits and I like to think that my morals and principles wouldn’t have let me stoop to those lows.. But it was there and it was rampant.
We were tribal.
But sometimes… sometimes the enemy isn’t a competitor.
Sometimes the enemy is that fat cat client, sitting behind a cheap desk in a posh glass building, pretending they rule the world.
This was one of those times.
Let’s call the fat cat, Pinnacle Capital.
Obviously the names here are changed and adapted to protect the innocent and give me huge directors licence, wink.. wink.
Anyway, Pinnacle Capital, a global investment company with the charm of a parking fine debt collector.
Their in-house talent acquisition team were under skilled, failed agents and overly arrogant due to the brand power their logo gave them.
The agents - Jason from Jekyll & Hyde, Jules from Proteus and me.
Deadly enemies.. Think of ‘The Anchorman 2’ and the final fight scene..
Anyway, long story short.. We’d all been ghosted on a number of roles over the year;
Job specs received.. Advertised.. Candidates searched.. CV’s submitted.. Candidates details added to client systems.. Interviews organised and then..
No feedback.. No calls.. just silence.
And so when a new Front Office, trading systems, team gets announced.. And each and every one of the team were ‘our’ candidates.. you can imagine how pissed off we were.
Initially we weren’t sure, but we were individually suspicious and it wasn’t until Jason organised a parley.. A beer in a neutral pub.. that we realised the full extent.
“I know they’re using the three of us,” Jason said. “And I think we’re being played.”
Jules agreed.
“I’ve met with my candidates and they’ve confirmed it”
So, it was confirmed, the whole team had been contacted directly by the internal talent team and we’d been cut out.
That’s just not cricket!
We escalated, brought it to the attention of the fat cat and were told we had no ownership and to get back in our corners.
And so, over a number of beers, we three agencies, normally competitive but now aligned, joined forces and created.. The Coalition.
We shared our candidate names. Interview dates… we even shared our fee structures.
We mapped out the time lines and called other candidates to gain more perspective.
It was clear that the internal talent acquisition team was playing a dodge and using us to locate hard to find candidates, stripping them of contact details with a view to owning the candidate for upcoming projects without paying the fees.
Shocking I know..
We wrote a joint letter. Something like this..
“Effective immediately, we three agencies will not supply candidates to you and until transparent processes and terms are agreed we will actively target and recruit from you and fulfill searches with your competitors…”
Three agencies. One powerful message.
There was silence.
And then a week later a call from Pinnacle’s Talent Director.
“We were surprised by your… coordination.”
Translation: How dare you organise yourselves?
But it worked.
Agreed terms. Agreed principles of relationship. Three specialist suppliers on an equal footing and an internal talent team not so fat cat arrogant and more inclined to professional partnership.
Oh.. and we went back to being enemies.. just not so mortal enemy.
“Have you ever teamed up with a competitor to take back power.. did it work, or backfire?”
When the game is rigged against you, don’t play.. If in doubt, get out. Change the rules. Change the game. Change the parameters.