What to expect from working with a headhunter?

"Adam has decided to continue his career outside the organization," you hear from the boss. Everyone congratulates your colleague on the new professional challenges, and you wonder how he "achieved this."

"A friendly headhunter found me a job," Adam proudly shares with a twinkle in his eye. He talks a bit about the behind-the-scenes of working with a recruitment agency employee and emphasizes that they helped him revise his CV. Then, he mentions the main facts related to the new position and the opportunities offered by the new employer. You quickly analyze Adam's career – in your opinion, it's nothing extraordinary – he achieves goals, but (let's face it) he's not an exceptional talent, and the company will survive without him.

You think to yourself – "if Adam could do it, then surely a headhunter can find me a job too."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Let's look at the role of a headhunter...

• A headhunter/recruiter/employment agency worker* is paid by their clients, i.e., companies/organizations or institutions for whom they work. The recruitment agency's fee is a multiple of the candidate's monthly salary or a percentage of their annual salary. Charging candidates fees is illegal.

• By signing a contract with a client, a recruitment agency offers a guarantee for the hired employee (usually from 3 to 6 months), meaning that if the employee or company resigns from cooperation, the agency must provide new candidates. In practice, this means that even if you "befriend" all the headhunters in the world and your skills do not reflect in the projects they lead, no headhunter will present your candidacy to the client.

• The work of a headhunter is also evaluated based on the quality of the proposed applications. First, the candidate's profile must be as closely matched to the client's expectations as possible; second, it must be appropriately highlighted in the CV. Not all candidates can develop a good CV (in most cases, CVs are simply poorly written). It happens that after deciding to propose a candidate to a client, a headhunter suggests that the candidate make changes to the CV for a specific recruitment project. Headhunters do not review general CVs of candidates. They mainly analyze CVs in terms of the projects they lead. Usually, they do not provide detailed feedback on application documents because they are not paid for it. Headhunters typically handle several projects simultaneously. In each project, they present a shortlist of about 3-4 candidates – often in practice, this means analyzing hundreds of CVs and talking to many candidates before presenting a shortlist to the client.

Who's Who? And How Can They Help You?

In the job market, there are also career advisors and career coaches. This group is paid by individual clients, i.e., people looking for a new job, a career change, or interested in future professional development. In short, the clients of career advisors are people actively looking for a job or those seriously thinking about their career development (not necessarily actively looking for work but wanting to sensibly analyze and plan their career, which is a definite minority). An advisor/Coach works for you – supporting you in the process of finding a new position or defining a career path. The most common services available in this formula include: analyzing application documents, preparing application documents, simulating job interviews, building your brand on social media, defining alternative positions, defining an educational path, defining headhunters/recruiters, defining companies you could work for, defining career plans, competency tests, defining talents, and help with salary negotiations. You pay a Career Advisor/Coach for a specific service or by the hour/hours of consultation. An advisor and career coach work for you, and their role is to actively support you in the process of professional change or analysis/planning of the next steps. However, they won't find a job for you.

Finding a new job position depends on several factors such as:

• the market situation,
• the "demand" for your skills at any given time,
• your experience, type of position, industry, and region where you are looking for work,
• your job search strategy,
• your approach to the job search process and commitment,
• your application documents, network (contacts), and in later stages, preparation for the job interview, effective communication with the potential employer throughout the recruitment process, your competitors participating in the recruitment process.

*Recruiter – usually uses the company's database in the recruitment process and looks for candidates through advertisements. Headhunter – usually looks for candidates through active methods, i.e., "hunting them from individual companies," currently mainly using social media, also uses their contact base, rarely acquires candidates through advertisements. Essentially, by definition, headhunters handle projects for the highest positions in companies (candidates earning min 75K USD annually). Headhunter is another slang term for so-called Executive recruiter/recruiter hiring top management. In Poland, the terms recruiter and headhunter are often used interchangeably, and recruiters like to call themselves headhunters; hence, I also used the collective term recruitment agency workers in the article (there are also other names such as "talent sourcer" – a person searching for talents).