Headhunting is not the same as recruitment. Do not overpay for your service.

Headhunting is not the same as recruitment. Do not overpay for your service.

Recruitment under the guise of headhunting.

You can pay for headhunting and get a recruitment process that your team can handle on its own.

This is quite common.

Here's how it works. You sign a contract with a company that calls itself headhunters. After two weeks, you get a list of candidates. You open it and at first glance something is wrong - because you could find half of these names yourself on LinkedIn in an hour. These are people who are actively searching or are visible after entering a few obvious phrases into the search engine. These are profiles that you would have found anyway through the ad. It's the same pool that you have access to from your own chair, and there's no point in paying for something that you can do quickly on your own.

You paid a headhunter's fee. You got application screening.

The difference between the two is not cosmetic. These are two different products that require different skills and tools.

Recruitment is taking over your process. Someone "launches your funnel" for you - the same ads, the same profiles, the same filtering down until there is a "remainder" - which may be worth considering. The result is the one who made it to the end. This is work that your team can do on its own. If someone is taking headhunter money for it, you've overpaid dearly.

Are you dealing with headhunting?

Headhunting is providing what your team doesn't have:

Access. The best engineers in the niche don't respond to job postings because they're not actively looking for work; that's obvious. They are not in your database and will not be, no matter how long the ads are visible. Reaching them means weeks of building contact, sometimes recommendations from the right people, and a conversation that doesn't start with "we have a role for you."

You need to create a talent map, not a list of people to call. Don't send "here are 20 people from the database"; instead, show what the market looks like, what competencies it has, and why these few candidates presented are the best possible choice.

System. Headhunting is often carried out in collaboration with several people, each of whom is responsible for a different part of the process. This allows you to clear many of the typical bottlenecks in the "recruitment" process. One of them is the available time resulting from the workload – it is impossible to carry out an effective headhunting process when 10 other projects are being conducted in parallel.

It is physically impossible.

Pace. A professional headhunting service takes days or weeks. With the right approach, you can map the market and talk to selected candidates in real time. This way, within 9-15 days, you will know what to expect later. It is a fact-based process during which you know how many candidates with what competencies are available in a given location.

When comparing proposals, also examine what you pay for under success-fee, retained and blended search models.

One simple test

There is one test that settles it. When you get a list of candidates, ask yourself:

Could I find these names myself in an hour on LinkedIn?

If so, you paid for recruitment and called it headhunting. If not - if these are people you would never have reached on your own - only then are you paying for what is worth paying for.

We're not writing this to attack the industry; the purpose is completely different. We're writing about this because the model in which headhunting is repackaged application screening harms everyone - the client who overpays and the companies that do it right, and they're all lumped together.

Before you sign another contract, ask directly: What will I get that my team wouldn't do on its own?

If the answer is "we will take over your process, or we will send you people from our database" - you get it for free. Ask for access to a niche market, a talent map, and speed. The rest is your own work with someone else's invoice.