Headhunting Benefits [page 1 of 2]
The reason headhunting is so successful is because it enables employers to recruit higher calibre employees than it’s possible to consistently recruit through any other recruiting method. This is why headhunting is employed as a key recruiting strategy by every firm in the 2010 Sunday Times Fast Track 100 list (the 100 fastest-growing private companies in the UK), as well as the vast majority of FTSE 100 companies and major government organisations.
In order to understand why headhunting works so much better than advertising for staff or using recruitment agencies, it's important to understand the difference between 'Active' and 'Passive' job-seekers.
In the recruitment industry, 'Active' job-seekers are defined as people who are looking for a new job so actively that they're applying to job advertisements and registering with recruitment agencies.
'Passive' job-seekers, on the other hand, are people who, if they change jobs, tend to be recruited by people they've worked with in the past, or through word-of-mouth recommendation. Passive job-seekers cannot be recruited through advertisements or agencies.
If your recruiting strategy consists of recruiting Active job-seekers through advertisements or agencies, you are handicapping yourself with two avoidable problems.
The first problem is that at any given moment in time, only 5% of people (1 in 20) are Active job-seekers. This limits choice and makes it very difficult for employers to find the 'right' person for a job. It also means it can sometimes be almost impossible to recruit good staff in areas of the country where demand for a certain type of employee outweighs supply.
The second problem is that the pool of Active job-seekers contains a very high proportion of poor quality candidates. As a rule, people don't tend to enjoy doing jobs they're not good at and employers don't tend to make much of an effort to look after poor-performers; these are the people who make up the majority of the pool of Active job-seekers. If this is the pool of candidates you recruit from, then there's a fair chance you will often simply end up hiring someone else's problem employee.