What do you mean "headhunter"?

It is never easy to take on a new career, but when you make the leap into recruiting you face a particularly difficult task; albeit, a worthwhile one. I am currently working with a new employee who is training to be a recruiter and it has brought back to me all of the trepidation I faced when I started in this industry.

I started in recruiting in 1999. I was a bright eyed and bushy-tailed new graduate with a degree in Communications. I was going to work for a PR firm and I was going to conquer the world. Two months later I was losing hope because I was not prepared for how competitive my chosen field was. Fortunately, I got a call from one of my sorority sisters. She was an HR graduate and had just gotten a job with a recruiting firm in Seattle. According to her, I was perfect for it and should apply. Thus began my career in recruiting.

As a completely green recruiter I was given an area to focus on – in my case, information technology – and instructed to learn as much as I could as fast as I could about technology. Techweb became my new best friend as I sat for hours reading resumes and looking up every term I didn’t know. There were a lot of terms. One spiral bound notebook full of them. Most days I went home with a headache and a sense of complete and utter stupidity. It took only a few interviews with highly talented folks to figure out how much I didn’t know and, at the same time, how much information had actually stuck.

At the same time I was suffering through the eternal vocabulary lesson, I was learning how to find candidates: sourcing resumes, data mining and formulating emails/phone messages most likely to get a response. I was also being trained to call in and direct recruit candidates out of specific companies. I vividly remember sitting in front of a phone with the trainer and a couple of other new recruiters. The trainer would dial a number on speaker phone and each of us took turns trying to get past the receptionist and into a specific department. Our trainer, who was clearly the anti-Christ, always called Amazon.com for these little ego-boosting exercises. The receptionist at Amazon had some kind of freaky 6th sense that a recruiter was on the phone. She would play little games with us like acting like we were being transferred to our target department and then leaving us on hold indefinitely. Looking back I would be willing to bet that the receptionist and the trainer were in cahoots, but I can’t prove anything.

The experience was vicious, but the lessons learned were priceless. To this day I can call anyone, anywhere, about anything…and I can do it without batting an eye.

It wasn’t long before the bottom fell out (thank you dotcoms!). Recruiting firms went out of business left and right, recruiters changed career fields and a few of us diehards hung on through the resulting requisition drought. Years later, I am still in the industry and those early lessons in headhunting help me more now than they did then. I have perfected my technique and lost the nerves. I have figured out what techniques work for me and further adapted them to my personality. I am “old school” and that gives me an edge.

The average burn-out rate for a recruiter is approximately 3 years (up from the 2 years back in the hey-day). That means the majority of recruiters in the field now were hired into firms and trained during a time where jobs were scarce and candidates plentiful. The skills used to match a candidate to a job have been, to a large extent, simple paper shuffling and basic screening.

Times, they are a’changin’.

As our marketplace shifts we find ourselves in a time where requirements are plentiful and truly skilled candidates are scarce. The good candidates are working. They took a package and moved to Tahiti. They certainly aren’t trolling job boards and applying to anything and everything that is remotely close to their skill set. You want the top talent now? You have to find them where they work. That is what us “old folks” know how to do. We cut our teeth on direct recruiting and we are experts at it now.

Thankfully, many of the less ethical recruiters jumped ship and they took their unethical recruiting practices with them. A good recruiter, a tried and true, old school headhunter like me, determines who your competitors are. We ask you which competitors we should leave alone. We call into your competitors and get the information we need without ever disclosing the client or lying about who we are. Good headhunters will get past the gatekeeper politely and ethically. They will talk to your competitor’s employees with respect and will identify those who are truly looking for a change. It is a skill that was lost when the “big box stores” of the recruiting world decided to build their very own assembly line of placements. A good headhunter will never “throw resumes at the wall” in the hopes that one of them will stick.

If you are a hiring manager wanting to work with a recruiter, take the time to find a recruiter you are comfortable with. A good one will meet your needs with great people and they will do it quickly, ethically and with enthusiasm. A good recruiter drops the smoke and the mirrors and they simply find talent so you don’t have to.