@Shanx Thank you for the com­ment. I believe as in every pro­fes­sion there are those who are mas­ters and those who do what it takes to get the pay­check. Those who are true “Recruiters”, ver­sus data­base check­ers and phone dialers, may or may not work for pres­ti­gious firms for a vari­ety of rea­sons. Those who just do what it takes to get the pay­check will never work for those firms.

Many times the life expectancy at a com­pany is rather short for those who just do the bare min­i­mum. I too have an issue with those recruiters. In June I dis­cussed robot recruiters on the Ani­mal Recruit­ing Show and took quite a bit of flack from my peers. You can lis­ten here: http://snurl.com/qs60b.

I believe the onus to ensure the right tal­ent is brought to the table is on the client. If I were hir­ing a firm to con­duct a tal­ent search for my com­pany it would need to pro­vide me with its port­fo­lio of clients and ref­er­ences from within. In other words, I would recruit the Tal­ent Magi­cian I felt I would work the best with and that would best meet my needs. Since the fee can rep­re­sent up to 40% of the annual salary for a place­ment my due dili­gence wouldn’t be con­ducted lightly.

For what my hum­ble opin­ion is worth, if you’ve run into or heard of sit­u­a­tions such as the ones you’ve described it means to me that not all the tools weren’t in the shed.

P.S. The sketch is funky indeed. I see what you mean about the water pis­tol. It was cour­tesy of my friends at The Growth­GAFFE Blog http://growthgaffe.wordpress.com.

I think it’s not so much the title of the “recruiter” but the approach. A head­hunter is clearly a part of the recruit­ing indus­try, and is as such a recruiter. It’s like argu­ing that Prada is just a bag or an Apple iMac is just a com­puter. Sure it is. But it’s a Prada, or it’s an Apple.

The def­i­n­i­tion you include clearly states some­thing spe­cial in the approach, of per­son­ally know­ing each client and can­di­date, which should be the main­stay of this pro­fes­sion. But it can­not be, thanks to the sheer nature of the indus­try. Too many roles required to be filled, clients who want CV key­word matches and want them yes­ter­day, the advent of large data­bases eas­ily man­aged, the com­pe­ti­tion with a monster.com or a jobsdb.com, and so on.

Even so, a “head­hunter” chooses not to join the rat race of key­word matchi.…oops, I mean recruit­ing. And that’s only the con­sul­tants out­side organizations.

Within an orga­ni­za­tion, the “HR” divi­sion had an impor­tant role to ful­fill when the infor­ma­tion age started. Today, the HR depart­ment is a bas­tion of paper­work, pay­roll man­age­ment, and other sundry tasks. I speak from expe­ri­ence with large global com­pa­nies, for instance the large oil and gas cor­po­ra­tion in the world or the Top 3 banks on the planet, that HR hardly gets involved in actual recruit­ment except for junior roles.

In a recent inter­ac­tion, I met an “HR direc­tor” who did present at best a gate­keeper posi­tion (a recent return from his Exec­u­tive MBA at Kel­logg, he strained to point out). Did he show inter­est in know­ing the candidate’s per­son­al­ity, his fun­da­men­tal smart­ness and wis­dom, his thoughts on what the role entailed and what he would bring to the table? Not quite. He was stuck on the sin­gu­lar issue that I did not–on paper–seem to have had any expe­ri­ence in his par­tic­u­lar industry.

This is not an iso­lated case. Most peo­ple in the per­func­tory HR busi­ness are of this kind. I know this is hardly the right place to men­tion this blas­pheme lit­tle obser­va­tion, but such is the bit­ter truth. Show me 10 recruiters and I’ll show you 9 buf­foons who could be replaced by chimps with monster.com and Microsoft Access skills.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, a head­hunter or [—insert fancy title here—] *chooses* not to get in the data­base busi­ness of managing/mining a gazil­lion can­di­dates with a 40% true suc­cess rate over time (I speak from an actual sta­tis­tic btw–and any thoughts from you would be great on how recruiters are mea­sur­ing their ROI these days, or at least the effi­cacy of their advice to clients over time), *chooses* instead to spend time focus­ing on the indus­try and the peo­ple on either side of the job, and focuses on the pre­mium, high qual­ity, durable relationships.

As such, a head­hunter is just a recruiter as much as an iMac is just a com­puter. Peo­ple with an Acer might say pfffft and snicker about the Apple, which is entirely their pre­rog­a­tive, but Apple chooses to tar­get a cer­tain audi­ence and enjoys great favor with it.