- Start relating to recruiters in your field long before you need them or they call you.
- Check them out if you've never heard of them.
- In your first week of orientation on a new job, tell your new boss not to get upset if he hears you've talked with a recruiter or a resume shows up: "They're calling me all the time."
- Never lie or even stretch the truth about education, job experience, salary, etc.
- Level with the recruiter if you'd entertain a counter-offer to stay.
Your typical headhunter looks mostly like you and me, provided you are a male WASP between thirty-five and sixty and you identify with the executive public at large. Some recruiters are tall, well-dressed, debonair, polished, "tennis, anyone?" types; others are short and round with food spots on their ties and pants badly in need of pressing. A few appear to be fast-talking city slickers, and maybe are. Others are slower moving clod-kicker types who punctuate their questions and comments with hesitation and who like to laugh a lot. Most are happily married family men who mow their own lawns on Saturdays and shoot an occasional 113 at their country clubs. About a third have been divorced and remarried. Almost all aspire to have their children graduate from good colleges and marry talented mates.
The more successful ones have a great deal in common: They are intellectually bright, socially adept, sensitive and quick in forming good judgments about man-job matches or mismatches, and they know either in person or over the telephone just about everybody they need to know to conduct their businesses well.
Generally, all of them can be found, when at work, garbed in at least one article of Brooks Brothers clothing. Their backgrounds are varied. Many had their early training and experience in the personnel relations field; still others cut their teeth in consumer goods marketing, general management in almost any field, or management consulting. Almost all of the highly successful recruiters' backgrounds contain an exposure to sales of a product or service. Some are Ph.D. psychologists. At least one is a former medical doctor. A few are attorneys who either disliked or failed at law. Virtually all once were executives themselves. Not even a handful are trained engineers or accountants, whose tendencies to think more in the realm of black and white than of unpredictable human behavior tend to disqualify them from evaluating people expertly. Contrary to publicity, almost none are college students, the temporarily unemployed, or housewives-the business is easy to crack, but not that easy.
Headhunters share other characteristics as well. They like to work on short-term assignments whose results can be quickly and observably measured and enjoyed. They have a penchant for living in suspense and by their wits, and they cannot abide for long what they portray as the predictable stability that characterizes ordinary executive jobs. They thrive on the stimulation and prestige of rubbing shoulders with industry, business, and private sector decision makers and leaders; most can hold their liquor as well as or better than the candidates they interview. The successful ones are self-motivated and compulsively hard working, accustomed to breakfast and dinner interviews, weekend phone calling, and living out of a suitcase. They take vacations, but never far from a telephone, and rare is the experienced headhunter who has not memorized Ma Bell's area code book and most of his clients' phone numbers.
They have even more in common: Their educational backgrounds run the gamut of average to superior, with probably over half being MBAs and many have attended the "right" schools. (One search firm headquartered in the east boasts a strong majority of Yale graduates.) Not only are headhunters degreed; their knowledge of the intimacies of dozens of occupations in scores of businesses is superior, thanks to the handling of an extreme variety of search assignments in countless industries. Many are equipped to discuss in detail (although with no expertise) over breakfast with a candidate the manufacture of hybrid integrated circuits, at lunch with another the current practices in fast food merchandising, and over cocktails with still another the laws and trends pertaining to mortgage banking. They must know the businesses of their client companies to represent them with competence, and they try hard to do so. At the very least, they have learned to excel in the use of the buzz words common to their clients' industries.
They are versatile in other ways as well. On the whole, they have excellent memories for names and faces; they know how to budget their time and travel, where to stay, and the better restaurants almost everywhere; and they are tactful masters of the art of using their airline smarts to get a seat on any oversold flight on which they failed to make a reservation. They write mellifluous business letters and reports with ease, they are selective in hiring secretaries who know how to charm everybody, and they have the believable sincerity of conviction to assure each client that his is their most interesting and challenging assignment and each candidate that he is very much in the running.
The headhunters' skill in amateur industrial psychology is unsurpassed by other amateurs in the field. Their interview style, using questions beginning with the words "who," "what," "when," "where,*" "why," and "how," is contrived to avoid the stereotypic "yes" or "no" answer; and probing is their learned substitution for accepting a response at face value.
The art of matching person and job demands far more of them than just finding a candidate or two with the right experience! The candidate must "fit" in other ways as well. A client company's president, formerly an all-American football player from Ohio State, may want a Casper Milquetoast as his vice president of finance, not another all-American jock with whom he must share a fading spotlight; or the compulsive, fingernail-biting vice president of manufacturing might explain that he wants an outgoing, hail-fellow-well-met for his production manager, not one of those "introspective types" who chew his nails. Of course, the headhunter must recognize without voicing his opinion that the only man acceptable will be a carbon copy of his client. Skill is required to recognize a good Casper Milquetoast or obsessive fingernail-biter when you see one.
Recruiters also are adept at handholding (called "client handling" in the trade) anxious client company officers who are convinced that things are not moving fast enough or are moving too fast. They have learned the knack of explaining the inexplicable, placating the implacable, soothing the rough sea, or stirring up the mill pond to set client or candidate minds at rest. Although they cannot duplicate Merlin's skill, they excel at trying.
On behalf of their clients, the headhunters have become skilled and innovative negotiators in matters pertaining to salaries, fringe benefits, bonuses, stock options, and other imaginative forms of compensation to concoct pay packages that will attract the selected candidate. A few have been justifiably accused by their clients of "giving away the shop" to make compensation more appealing; most do not. Their orientation is management's, not the candidate's; besides, they want repeat engagements for doing a job well.
Finally, headhunters pride themselves on being just plain good businessmen, and most are. My observation is that, on the whole, they are interesting people and real, and they count among their friends the business people with whom they have become close, clients and candidates alike.
