Discreetly Marketing Your Professional Abilities by Partnering with a Headhunter

I used to work for a man who was a headhunter in both the literal and figurative sense of the word. On the day I went into the office to interview, I couldn’t help but to notice the mounted animal heads on the office walls. There was a kudu, some kind of wild boar, some antelopes, and even a few pathetic-looking birds. After learning that the Mrs. had put her foot down and said that the trophies wouldn’t be allowed in my boss’s new home, I didn’t find the stuffed wildlife strange. What I did find strange was what the company actually sold: people.

Fresh out of college, I was interviewing for an administrative assistant position (not very ambitious, but I had bills to pay). I had responded to a very terse ad placed on my alma mater’s career services board and was called in (and hired) less than two days later. Prior to my interview, I had minimal knowledge of how outsourced recruiters worked. On my first day while working I got to see how my boss found his leads. At the time there were only three people out in the bullpen – my boss, my boss’s son (a junior recruiter), and me. I could hear every word of every conversation. I could feel my face freezing up from the palpable tension in the room. The first time I heard him cold-call into a company to try to poach a candidate, I was blown away.

I spent two years in what eventually became an office of fifteen headhunters and can tell you first-hand why some professionals get solicited repeatedly, and why others never do. Let’s first understand a few basic principles of the business of recruitment.

First and foremost, true headhunters are contracted by clients to find qualified candidates who are already doing a specific job. They don’t want someone who says that they “could probably” do a job.  They need someone from the clients same industry who already has proven success in a role – someone with quantifiable accomplishments. While a car salesman may have sold a lot of cherry red Mustangs during his career, that’s no guarantee he’ll be able to sell luxury yachts.