What is a Professional Headhunter?

Blow-pipe jokes aside – A professional Headhunter is a specialist recruiter who possess the experience and resources to build you a solution to your recruitment needs.

Deeply understanding your business and its strategic requirements.

Combine this understanding with a unique proactive recruitment process / Methodology, designed around your needs.

Deliver you a shortlist of great candidates, all capable of doing the job specified.

Sounds great – I’ll have one!

Hold on!

Though Headhunt recruitment is the ultimate recruitment service, it’s not right for every project.

Why NOT use a Headhunter?

First of all a Headhunter will charge you more (on average between 25-35% of first year base salary).

Including a retainer (up front fee to take the project, and cover research and set up costs).

They will also require exclusivity on the project

Charge you at the short-list stage often with no refund should you not hire any of the candidates.

This means you may have to pay a large chunk, if not the entire fee and...

not hire anyone!

Maybe I won’t have one!

When should I use a Professional Headhunter?

When the role you are looking to fill is critical to the business.

When you want to be discrete, maybe the vacancy weakens your business.

When there’s a limited number of people willing or capable of filling the role.

When you want to specifically target based on, required experience, companies and positioned worked, and maybe even naming target individuals.

When you want to woo your target audience, with a unique tailored reason to consider joining your company.

When you want to guarantee the clarity and quality of your recruitment message.

The final two refer to the superior branding a headhunt message will deliver to your targeted potential colleagues.

This is far more compelling than seeing or hearing about a role via advertising, or office gossip, or from one of many agencies punting the role around.

Not sure you want a headhunter... check out no hire no fee contingency recruitment options

Convinced you need to hire a Headhunter – let’s press on...

How to find a Professional headhunter?

Many Executive Headhunters don’t advertise, they gain their business from word of mouth recommendation, so don’t need to.

Searching in recruitment directories will find you agencies, but not proven Headhunters.

My suggestion would be to:-

Check your personal network, see if you know anyone who could have completed a similar recruitment exercise, and ask who they used.

If you are a member of a business networking group such as Linkedin or Ecademy many of their members are recruiters, and with the excellent search facilities you should identify some credible options.

If after these two options you don’t have two or three to talk to I would Google it.

Create a comparable search

For example type in the Boolean string below replacing with your appropriate details -

Job AND “Risk Director” AND “Investment Banking” AND London

The results will mostly be job boards with agencies advertising similar roles. Some of these agencies may offer headhunt services.

Once you have found two or three to talk to, you need to decide which to use.

For Headhunting recruitment to work best, you need to form a working partnership, with both parties sharing information, and with open communications throughout the hiring process.

It really helps if both parties like each other!

Before hiring a headhunter – ask

Understand the detail / methodology of how they will research to identify candidates.

Confirm any specific criteria for screening candidates (you may want to use for example psychometric testing).

Explain how you want reporting and communications to work.

Get references.

All this done – your good to go!

Call us on 01344 776386

If you’re looking for a professional headhunter to recruit a senior Risk Consultant or Business Continuity Consultant in the UK… I would love to help



Return from Professional Headhunter to About us

Custom Search