A friend of mine recently told me he was contacted by a head hunter. Head Hunter is not someone from the company’s HR, a Head Hunter is someone who works on commission to place people with their client companies.
With all these job sites, why would any company really need to pay a 25% commission to a head hunter to find a match when the company has an HR office which regularly hires people for those positions?
I was discussing this with a friend of mine. He said he was contacted by a head hunter who saw his profile on Linkedin. He told him on the phone he would be the lead person in charge of an area reporting to upper management saying the salary was “open”. He gets a call the next day from the head hunter where he was told the hiring manager is very impressed with his background and set-up a phone interview the next day with the hiring manager. Only to have him call back a couple hours later that the hiring manager can’t make that time, but the head hunter would be meeting with the hiring manager later that day. He gets the job description and does his own research only to find the job is not in charge of the area, but is going to be one of several other people doing the same job. He said the head hunter mentioned the hiring manager’s name and found out through Linkedin, this hiring manager isn’t in upper management.
This just sounds like complete bullshit to me. They contact people, getting them all pumped up with lies and then try to shoehorn them into a lower level job. Who knows what lies they are telling the hiring manager about the candidates.
This just begs the question, what value are these head hunters providing any longer when the company can post a job and let HR do the regular screening.
I know from my own experience in the software industry, that head hunters have contacted me and misunderstood what my skills are and try to talk me into taking a job I clearly don’t want. I quickly reached a point where if they are a head hunter, I kindly tell them I only deal with the companies directly and not third-parties.
How is this work 25% commission to these companies? Are they using head hunters to find people at a cheaper cost, thus more than earning their 25% commission on the first year’s salary?
It costs a company a lot of money (mostly in time of HR people & managers) in finding & interviewing appropriate job candidates.
The good headhunters are worth their commission in that they do a lot of pre-screening for the company (they only get paid if the person is hired). And they specialize in an area, and know what skills are needed, and may know of possible candidates who are not actively looking.
But the bad headhunters don’t do this – they just send anybody who’s skills are vaguely close to what the company wants. And they lie to both the company & the job seeker about the job. They soon get a bad reputation at hiring companies, though they can fool job seekers for longer.
Before there were all the online job sites, there were a fair number of good headhunters. It seems to be a much less viable business now, with a higher percentage of bad headhunters.
In some industries agents are also used, the difference being that the agent gets an amount every month (1) and the headhunter gets a flat amount. Good agents:
pay the contractors on a clear schedule. The contractors don’t have to advance months’ worth of expenses, the end client can play their cashflow games.
mediate problems
have contact information for multiple subcontractors, so they may be able to provide a replacement quicker than someone just starting the search
1: depending on the sector, it’s a % of what the contractor makes and charged to the contractor, or what they do is charge the end client an amount that’s a function of how much the contractor works and then pay less to the contractor. In this second case, never believe that the % they say they charge truly is the one they add.
Yep, I just switched firms. Based on a headhunter recruiting me. He got 75% of my prior income from the hiring firm and everyone seems happy. I wasn’t thinking or moving, in general, but the position was worth doing and I’d never have known about it without this middleman working as a connection.
The headhunters in my industry are in an ecosystem of several layers, with the bottom-most scouring job postings and then flipping through LinkedIn profiles hoping to create a match, or the appearance of a match, so they can get their name on your resume. The folks doing that have dwindled as far as I can tell, to a handful, mostly new entrants who haven’t realized yet that it won’t pay off, or who are trying to cover a bunch of industries at once. My guess is their few successes come from more entry-level folks who don’t know better.
At the highest layer they have connections with Recruiting/HR in my company, and are careful about winnowing through potential matches, not just in capacity match, but sometimes also in culture match. We’ll use them for a retained search sometimes, because they have relationships with folks at other companies and can at least raise the topic with them.
Yeah, I don’t have direct experience, and it probably doesn’t always work this way, but I think the point of the headhunter is to find people who aren’t actively looking for a new job. Otherwise… they’d be head-gatherers?
in just the past year or 2 the headhunters contacting me went from 90% American to 80% Indian. Which I guess mirrors the way tech jobs are moving now in the US.
Many companies have moved the payroll and recruiting functions like from staffing firms to places like India because the labor costs are so much lower than in the US.
Did you get a real bump in salary by moving? Did you look in a place like Glassdoor to see what the salaries were for your position to see if you got good treatment?
Did anything by the headhunter turn out to be a lie? Did it meet your expectations now that you are in the new job?
That has been my impression is how they would be most useful. If I’m a CEO at a company and I know they have a great CTO at another company, but I don’t want to approach them directly I could see using a good headhunter to contact this CTO and determine their level of interest of joining our company. But I can’t imagine there are that many jobs at that level playing musical chairs to keep all these head hunters in business.
Headhunters sometimes say they are doing a retained search, but I wonder if there is a way to actually verify this with the company? HR at companies is so difficult to get in contact with to begin with, it would be interesting to know if they would confirm or deny they are doing a retained search by a company that’s claiming to do so?
Good headhunters fill hard to fill jobs, not ones for which job boards might be useful. When I was hiring, I never even looked at a job board.
Job posts at a company site could be useful, but ours were usually out of date. My boss, who did the official hiring, was the only one who could look at ours, and he often took a month to get the resumes that piled up.
I got hired using a good headhunter for a management job. This guy earned his commission. It was definitely a retained gig. This was before job boards. Not that this job would have shown up on one. A good headhunter has a network and finds people who might be interested and who are qualified.
When headhunters called me, I always asked them to tell me the kinds of things I did, and the area I worked in. If they had no clue, I wasn’t interested. It is a good test for cold calling.
Take a look at https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/. Nick is a headhunter and has lots to say about crooked headhunters, job boards, and how HR is often broken. Wait until Wednesday - this week’s discussion is awful, and isn’t a good indicator of what usually goes on there.
I love headhunters because they tend to be more interested in culture fit than check boxes.
Headhunters typically have a deeper understanding of the needs, both cultural and technical that are required and I find that they help me get in front of people who I want to work with and in teams where I can contribute as much as possible.
That said I would term the cold calls you are getting as call center recruiters, and not head hunters. There is a group of companies that make their living that way but they are the bottom feeders.
The main problem is our industry itself though. We tend to have silly over specific job descriptions that filter out productive candidates then we tend to push people though stupid trivia based interview loops where we ask them out of date irreverent trivia questions that often filter out qualified candidates.
As an example, fretting about if someone knows the OSI network layers, or making people whiteboard a bubble sort.
Really if we were focusing on “avoid Θ(n^2) crap code” or seeing how quickly someone can solve a problem with normal sources (I know you probably use stackoverflow/google to help with problems) instead of the cargo culted trivia model that the normal job posting model would work better. Even though I really didn’t want to work for them Google’s foobar system that pops up and gives you challenges is an awesome model, and I wish there was some way to make it a broader model.
Basically they give you a number of challenges with time constraints. It started out easy then quickly expanded up to the “Learn Absorbing Markov chains in a few days” level. Even though I am past the recruiting level there I want to find time I can finish all levels just because I learned so much, unfortunately that time hasn’t presented itself due to work levels.
Outside of having insight and motivation that I can leverage for my benefit, they are very helpful in finding qualified candidates that our typical model probably filters out with direct submissions.
Another thing good agents/headhunters can do is tell the hiring people “that’s going to be difficult”.
Last week I got an email asking for a SAP consultant for Maintenance, Warehouse Management and Costing; additional experience required in Sales and Finance. And a pink flying pony. Ah, no, no, they didn’t ask for the pony. But the rest amounts to “we want one person to do a job which should involve at least three, most commonly five.” Finance plus Costing is a relatively common combo; some unicorns out there are capable of handling both Sales and Warehousing but are unlikely to do both in the same project since they like being alive. A good agent or headhunter knows enough about the field to be able to say “you’ve got to be feverish or kidding” in a way that doesn’t send the recruiter into a rampage.
We’re primarily a systems integrator/managed service provider, but we have a recruiting arm that focuses on our core technologies. This allows us to vet the candidates before they are presented to our client.
Similar to Nava, my pet peeve is when the client requests wildly different skills - “We need someone with a PMP, a masters in AI, and will also do some QA work”. Or they are looking for someone with 10 years experience with Azure and 5 years of SQL 2016.
It’s interesting you should mention that, because my friend who got this job description from the headhunter listed enough skills which would be done by several full-time employees. It’s like they took requirements from a few job descriptions and listed them all in this one job.
I’m getting the feeling that some headhunters are a lot like some real estate listing agents. They want to get the listing, so they take whatever crazy high selling price the client wants, and then when no offers come in after it is on the market for a month or so, they do “Plan B” which is to talk them into lowering their expectations. But if they were real with the client from the start, they wouldn’t get the listing because the client is unrealistic. The headhunter might take their wish list of a job description and when no one they find has all those skills, they a ready with their “Plan B” to get the client to change their expectations and alter the requirements.
My friend told me today, he’s decided not to work with this headhunter.
This isnt the level of the jobs mentioned above but I knew a woman who ran a nanny placement service (a headhunter sort of) and charged $1,000 for a full time nanny.
Now you might wonder, why cant a family just place an ad on Craigslist and interview candidates?
Well she did all the pre-screening. The person had to pass all the background checks and get reference checks. They went thru first aid and cpr training. In addition the family would get a refund if the person didnt work out in say 2-3 months. She became very good at finding the right nannies. In fact, she had a waiting list of families wanting her services.
In point of fact, yes, my pay bump is on the order of 80%. But I’m in a high margin industry and I took on significant new responsibilities surrounding company expansion over a four-state area. So yeah, with great power comes great cash or something like that.
In terms of the headhunter, no I don’t think he lied. It was pretty straightforward because guys like him call all the damn time - and I’ve no doubt they’d lie if they had to - exploring whether I’m interested. This one didn’t make much of a pitch, just that he’d been contracted to find someone with skills X,Y and Z who might be open to a discussion. When I said yes, he connected me with my new firm’s CEO and we worked it out from there. Took several months.
I work in the defense industry, and though we have HR-based recruiters, they are overwhelmed by requests from the entire company. They are also not very technical, though we are an engineering firm, so having them screen resumes and find candidates can be problematic.
Add to this that candidates almost always require security clearances and if you add an unusual location, like Alaska or a small town (Ridgecrest, CA), the candidate pool dwindles quite a bit. and even people who say they will move anywhere in a job profile will typically change their mind when faced with a mountain of snow, or horrendous desert heat.
So yes, we do use head hunters for certain hard to fill positions.
