The recruitment marketplace has experienced a number of seismic shifts over the course of the last 15 years or so. Fifteen years ago, email was barely being used; Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google didn’t exist (Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old!), and advertising for roles was done in print, not online; CVs were still largely being faxed or posted, and the only way to get good candidates in the market was to advertise, use an agency, or through internal referrals.
Now with the Internet, social media, and applicant tracking systems, organizations are no longer entirely reliant on recruitment firms to provide candidates and market intelligence. Of course there has been a shift toward corporate internal recruiters and RPO models in the past 10 years, but internal headhunters (which I differentiate from internal “recruiters”), and real market-mapping and cold-call headhunting is still very rare. Why? Well, mapping out competitors and building market intelligence takes time and time are of course expensive. Whereas an internal recruiter may work on upward of 100 vacancies per year (the numbers hugely fluctuate from company to company influenced by seniority of role, etc.), an internal headhunter doing the full lifecycle process may work on as few as 15 to 20 searches per year.
There’s also the issue of the skillset required to do both roles. It’s very different asking a recruiter to sift through 100 resumes received in an inbox from a job posting than it is to ask a headhunter to start with a blank sheet of paper and map out the firm’s top six competitors and cold-headhunt call everyone at those firms who may have a relevant skillset. In my time spent heading up an executive search function at J.P Morgan, I never once posted a job advertisement. My role was purely to headhunt top talent in the market.
An internal headhunter is of course a role that should be used only for particular vacancies. It may be the most senior roles, or for niche roles, where typical channels to market aren’t satisfying the requirement.
So how do you convince the budget holders to invest in an internal headhunter who costs more than a typical internal recruiter, but who works on far fewer roles? keep reading…


















