Headhunter FAQ’s & Musings

Before delving too deeply into the the subject of why companies should utilize third party recruiters, I want to confess that I am a third party recruiter (headhunter). I may be a bit biased, but I want to point out that as a hiring manager for 16 years, I have directly or indirectly retained the services of many headhunters to find engineers and technicians.

The most obvious reason for hiring a third party recruiter (or headhunter) is to save time and therefore, money (yes hiring a headhunter can be less expensive in the long run). Of course, everyone hates to spend money to obtain the services of a recruiter — especially when you know that you could find the perfect candidate, if you just had a bit more time. But extra time is hard to come by in this era of ever increasing job responsibilities and shrinking staffs. In this business era, the old “time is money” cliche was never more true.

Savings realized from retaining the services of third party recruiters are usually from hidden costs that are often hard to quantify. The most obvious potential cost saving is obtained by giving the human resources personnel more time to develop better programs to reduce benefit costs, provide more time to work more closely with managers and supervisors, develop programs to retain employees, increase the quality of sexual harrassment training courses, concentrate on diversity hiring, solve employee issues, etc. Quality of life and family issues might also improve for the HR personnel because they would not be expected to do telephone screenings from their homes in the evenings and weekends.

Another lost opportunity cost is due to hiring from a weak candidate pool. Time and other issues often force companies to use the historical methods of candidate searches; e.g. Help Wanted Ads in Newspapers, Job Boards such as Monster, and paying employees to recommend their friends. Unfortunately for hiring companies who use traditional recruiting methods, the best people (the top ten percent or so) are not looking for a job when the company is trying to hire. They are not looking at the Newspaper Help Wanted or Job Board Advertisements, and hiring the friends of individuals already working in the company reduces diversity in the hiring process. The hiring company is often left with a pool of candidates that are out of work (not always bad but sometimes questionable), disgruntled employees who might bring their bad attitudes with them, etc. but usually not the upper tier candidates you want in your organization. Of course some companies know they do not want or are not able to attract or keep top tier candidates (an issue for a future blog article).

There are usually a couple of reasons that Human Resources cannot find these hidden prospects. Developing a Rolodex or ACT database of potential candidates takes a lot of time. Calling into your competitor to recruit their employees can result in lawsuits or, at the very least, a tit-for-tat situation where they try to hire your employees.

Most Third Party Recruiters have a candidate database or access to candidate databases through associations of recruiters such as The Top Echelon Network, the National Personnel Associates Cooperative, Inc., etc. which have candidates not found on the job boards. Third party recruiters can also call into competitor’s companies with little (but not zero) chance of creating lawsuits. The Third Pary Recruiter can also be given a list of competing companies where they can “harvest” candidates.

The final lost opportunity cost is due to delays in the hiring process. Delaying hiring of employees to fill key positions can be a hidden cost that can actually be the largest and the hardest to identify. When I was an engineering manager, I often spent my employer’s hard earned money utilizing the services of a third party recruiter because of the need to fill a critical engineering position quickly. I could not afford to wait for the Human Resources Department to run advertisements and wait for weeks for responses (pre-Monster era). Very often not having that key engineer was costing the corporation tens of thousands of dollars per week in lost revenue because the launch of a key product or execution of a major cost reduction project was being delayed.

Let’s face it, hiring is usually relegated to catch-as-catch-can priority across all levels of the organization, not just Human Resources. Often the company that states “our employees are our greatest asset” is just as guilty about giving hiring too low a priority as the company that believes their employees are a pain in the ass but unfortunately cannot make the product(s) without them. Hiring a Third Party Recruiter can bring that urgency to the hiring process that is badly needed.

There are of course, other reasons to hire a headhunter and my next blog will deal with them. Just to keep the playing field even, a future blog posting will be “When Not To Hire Third Party Recruiters.”