What does a headhunter do?
A day’s work, and what AI can take on

01

What does a search consultant actually do?

Put simply, a search consultant finds people for companies. When a company has a role it has tried to fill for a while without success, or would rather not advertise, it asks a consultant to go into the market, find the right person and bring them on board. The consultant is neither the company’s employee nor the candidate’s agent. They stand between the two and make a match that both sides are happy with.

• The client side

  Find companies that need to hire, win the mandate and find out who the team is really missing. After putting candidates forward, follow up on interview feedback and help negotiate the offer, all the way to the start date.

• The candidate side

  Find the right people, make a good first call, and learn about their experience and plans. Help them judge whether the opportunity is worth a look, then stay with them through interviews, resigning and starting the new job.

The two sides call for very different work. With clients, you have to be something of a business partner, who understands their industry and their team. With candidates, you have to be a friend they can count on: honest, and never pushy. For consultants who have been in the job a long time, the most valuable thing they hold is often not any one CV but the trust they have slowly built on both sides.

02

What does a headhunter’s day look like?

No two days are quite the same, but the rhythm is much alike. For a consultant working several live searches at once while still bringing in new clients, a fairly typical day goes like this:

1. First thing: take stock

   Answer the messages left from last night, see which candidates are waiting on interview feedback and which processes have stalled, and line up what has to move today.

2. Morning: do the research

   For each live search, pick target companies, go through the CV database and dig into public information to build a list of people to approach. This stretch needs the most quiet, and takes the most time.

3. Afternoon: make calls

   Reach out to candidates, set up interviews and check progress with the client’s HR and hiring managers. A call may be over in a few minutes, or run for an hour.

4. Early evening: write reports

   Write candidate reports for the people who seemed a good fit, sort through interview feedback, answer candidates’ questions, and note down what changed today.

5. Evening: still taking calls

   Many candidates can’t talk freely during the day. A job move is often something they can only open up about after work.

And there are constant interruptions: a client changes the brief at short notice, a candidate gets another offer and asks what you think, someone you’ve already placed runs into trouble during the guarantee period. Time to sit down for a solid block of research is usually scarcer than you’d expect.

03

What are the steps in a search, from mandate to start date?

Filling a role takes roughly the steps below. Any of them can stall, and sometimes you have to go back a step and start again. A candidate may get through several rounds of interviews before it turns out the brief was never clear in the first place.

1. Win the mandate

   Spot the need in funding news, a change on a careers page or an introduction from an existing client, agree how you’ll work together, and get the job description (JD).

2. Pin down the brief

   Talk to the hiring manager to separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves, and learn why the team is hiring now and what it really lacks.

3. Set the direction and find people

   Map the org charts of target companies, go through your own CV database, fill the gaps from public information and draw up a longlist.

4. Approach and assess

   Contact people one by one, talk through their experience and ask what drives them. Pick out those who truly fit and are open to the opportunity, and write their candidate reports.

5. Move interviews and the offer forward

   Arrange interviews, pass feedback both ways, and help the two sides find terms on pay, level and start date that both can accept.

6. Start and follow up

   Help the candidate through resigning and handing over, then stay in touch for a while after they start to make sure both sides are happy.

Newcomers often think finding people is the hardest step. With time, you find that pinning down the brief at the start and closing the offer at the end take more skill. Get the brief wrong, and no amount of searching afterwards will help. Let the offer fall apart, and all the work before it may come to nothing.

04

What is the hardest part of being a headhunter?

The difficulty rarely lies in any one task. It lies in the fact that everything needs someone else’s yes. The client has to say yes, the candidate has to say yes, and sometimes the candidate’s family or current boss can still change the outcome.

• The outcome isn’t all in your hands

  However good the fit, the client may suddenly freeze headcount, or the candidate may accept a counteroffer from their current employer at the very last step.

• There’s never enough information

  Clients don’t voice every concern, a CV may be two years old, and the same person may hold different titles in different places.

• Your time is chopped up

  You keep switching between research, calls, reports and follow-ups. The work that most needs a solid block of time is the first to be squeezed out.

• Past research doesn’t stick

  Companies you’ve looked into and people you’ve spoken to are scattered across notes, spreadsheets and chat logs, so next time you start digging all over again.

There’s a psychological side too. With several processes moving at once, any one of them can fall through at the final step. Consultants have to get used to that uncertainty: not taking a single failure too hard, and not treating a single success as a sure thing.

05

What can headhunters use AI for, and what stays with them?

Broadly, AI can help a good deal with looking things up, reading material, checking information and keeping track of changes. Take HunterBuddy, the AI partner for headhunters. It’s still in development and offered as an invitation-only trial, and it can take on these six jobs:

• BD client research: it watches the sectors you follow, spots expanding companies in funding news and on careers pages, and finds new roles, hiring managers and routes to an introduction.
• Org charts: it lays out the departments and reporting lines of target companies and their peers, noting where each piece of information came from and which positions are still blank.
• Job matching: it checks a JD against your CV database and public information, and for each candidate sets out why they match, the sources and what still needs confirming.
• Automated sourcing: it looks for people in public information, patents and papers, code footprints (public code and repositories) and your CV database, and checks several records of the same person before merging them.
• Finding the real name behind an alias: when all you have is an alias, the nickname many Chinese tech companies use at work, or a few scattered clues, it cross-checks several public sources, rules out namesakes, suggests a suitable way in, and flags anything uncertain for you to confirm.
• Keeping your network current: it watches key candidates’ public career histories and team changes, and when you get a new CV after a conversation, the record and the matches are updated together.

• Business development · 2 sourcesNew on the careers page: Head of Computer Vision

  The careers page and the funding news agree.

• Org chartsXingchuan and two peer companies

  Departments and reporting lines are mapped. The product delivery team is still blank.

• SourcingYue Lin, Ning Zhou, Si Chen

  Why each one matches is noted alongside. To confirm: team size, any mass-production experience, openness to a move.

The rest, AI can’t do for you. Whether someone is truly capable or just has a well-written CV, whether what the hiring manager says matches what they actually want, whether a candidate will tell you what they really think: these call for judgment built from face-to-face conversations and long dealings with people. How much a candidate chooses to share, and whether they want to be approached at all, is also theirs to decide, and yours to respect.

HunterBuddy uses only public information and your own material. Every finding names its source, and who to contact and how to open the conversation is up to you.

06

Is headhunting a good career, and who suits it?

Honestly, it’s easy to get into and hard to do well. The field isn’t fussy about what you studied: if you’re willing to pick up the phone and learn an industry, you can get started. The hard part is that results come slowly. Your first few searches may take a long time to close, and with income tied directly to placements, it swings a lot. The first year or two are often the toughest.

Those who stay usually value other things: seeing deep into one industry, knowing a circle of truly outstanding people, and the very real satisfaction of closing a placement. The longer you stay, the more your client and candidate relationships are worth. People who suit the work tend to share a few traits:

• Curious about people, and happy to listen to them talk about their careers and plans.
• Able to take rejection, and not discouraged when calls so often go unanswered.
• Willing to spend time getting deep into one industry, until they understand its technology and its business.
• True to their word, never exaggerating or holding things back to close a deal.

AI will change how the work is done, but is unlikely to change what it is. Less time will go into research, and more into judging people, reading clients and building trust face to face. That second part has always been the most valuable part of the job.