Previously, headhunting was something of the Holy Grail of recruitment – the idea that someone would have heard about your skills and successes and gone to the trouble of tracking you down in order to make you a job offer was a wonderful one. But headhunters do exist and there is actually little magical about their processes and abilities – they just work very hard to find not just a good candidate for a job, but the perfect candidate for that job!
Oftentimes headhunters will find and sound out candidates that are not actively seeking jobs, in order to make them an offer they cannot refuse. Or that they do not want to refuse, which amounts to the same thing!
But can you ask a headhunter to work the other way? Is it possible that a headhunter can find you a better position – that ideal dream job – more effectively than a regular recruiter?
The answer is unhelpful: both yes and no!
No, no one can create a job out of thin air, and even if that perfect position exists it is your experience, skills, and work ethic that will land you the job.
Or even just get you an interview. That is the bad news – now onto the good.
Yes, a headhunter, such as Eagle Headhunters certainly can help you to help yourself up the ladder. While many jobs that use the services of a headhunter do service executive positions – CEOs, directorships and so on – more and more companies are turning to headhunters to fill more diverse positions simply because headhunters are more rigorous in their hunt for the perfect candidate. This means that if you have, as mentioned above, done all the hard work and risen to the top at your current workplace, and caught the headhunter’s eye, then you will be up against a much smaller pool of fellow job-seekers.
However, one point must be made – you will not be hiring the headhunter to find you a job.
Prospective employees should never pay a recruiter of any sort, from entry-level to the highest executive positions – this can raise all sorts of ethical questions in some industries and professions and could result in an even wider rich-poor divide, quite apart from simply not being the done thing.
Instead, it is the business that will pay the headhunter once you have signed your letter of permanent employment, usually after three to six months on completion of a probationary period. You may worry that this means that you will be forced into unsuitable positions, just to make targets, but this does not happen at the headhunter level, and is, in fact, the sign of a poor recruiter who will soon have grounds to regret their hasty actions when the company complains and the candidate leaves after only a short time!
Headhunters take great pride in making great matches between companies and candidates, and it does not really matter that you are not their primary concern on the financial front. The business being happy with the arrangement tends to mean that the candidate is too, making it a truly win-win situation!
