Headhunting

What counts as headhunting

Headhunting is proactive: someone identifies a specific person for a specific role and approaches them, rather than posting the job and reviewing who applies. That’s the core difference from a recruitment agency, the broader category: most agency work is contingency, built around a published role and screening whoever responds. Headhunting is a narrower practice inside that category, named and exclusive, usually reserved for roles where the right person would never apply on their own.

It also isn’t the same as having a sourcer on staff. A sourcer does outbound work for an internal team, across many open roles, at volume. Headhunting is typically outsourced, exclusive to one search at a time, and built around a single named individual rather than a pipeline of candidates.

How the engagement actually works

Most headhunting is retained: the client pays a firm to run one search, exclusively, whether or not it produces a hire. A 2016 SHRM guide to executive search firms put the retained fee at around 33% of a role’s annual salary, bonus, and signing bonus combined (roughly total first-year compensation), against 20-25% for a contingency recruiter who only gets paid on a placement (SHRM). The fee is usually staged: a portion to open the search, a portion at shortlist, the rest at placement.

The people a headhunter approaches are usually passive candidates: employed, and not applying anywhere. SHRM frames the distinction plainly: looking for a specific person, not a specific skill set. One name, one approach, one negotiation, not a funnel of CVs to filter.

Where it stops making sense

The retained fee is the same whether the search takes six weeks or six months, which is the real risk for a small company: a slow month for the search firm is still a paid month. On a €90,000 mid-level hire, a third of salary is real money committed before a candidate even exists. That math holds for a genuinely hard-to-fill, business-critical role. It holds poorly for a role your own team could fill with a well-written ad and a few referral calls, especially since executive hiring is getting pricier anyway: SHRM’s 2026 benchmarking puts the median cost-per-hire for an executive role at $15,000, up from $8,800 in 2022 (SHRM). A retained fee sits on top of that figure, not inside it.

There’s a timing trap too. SHRM’s 2026 recruiting benchmarking puts the median time-to-fill for executive roles at 45 days, unchanged from 2025 and down from 60 in 2022 (SHRM). That clock starts once a search is formally underway. The weeks a retained firm spends mapping the market and building a shortlist before that point never show up in the 45 days, so a tight deadline is a poor reason to bring one in.

What to check before calling it a success

A completed search isn’t automatically a good hire. Two checks worth running:

• Was the shortlist reachable any other way? If the names were findable on LinkedIn in an afternoon, the fee bought speed, not access.
• Did the placement stay? A fee this size only pays for itself if the hire is still there a year later; a fast exit means the company paid a third of a salary for a bad match.

At MARTENS & PRAHL, it was the team’s most experienced recruiter — someone with headhunting experience of her own — whose reaction settled it: seeing Join, she asked if it could really do all of this in one tool, and that’s what told the Recruiting Lead they’d made the right call (customer story). A headhunted candidate still needs a pipeline stage, a scorecard, and a record of who said what. The search being exclusive doesn’t mean the process after it should be.