Myth 1: “’Headhunter’ and ‘Recruiter’ are just
different names for the same thing.”
Truth: A recruiter runs ads, holds job fairs and does
other things to attract “active candidates”, i.e., people who are actively job
hunting, while a headhunter doesn’t run ads. Why would he? The clients who hire
headhunters have probably already run employment ads and have received resumes
from hundreds or thousands of active jobseekers . The candidates headhunters
are paid to find aren’t looking for a job so they aren’t seeing employment ads.
Why would they?
Myth 2: “I should send my resume to headhunters,
right?”
Truth: No, if you send your resume to a headhunter
you are, by definition, an active jobseeker, not the passive candidate
headhunters seek. Headhunters know that if you have an up-to-date resume and
you are offering to send it, you’ve probably already sent it to everybody you
can think of. Why do headhunters seek passive candidates? Because that’s what
clients want. By the time a client hires a headhunter, the client has tried to
fill the job opening by word-of-mouth and by advertising. They didn’t find what
they are looking for so now they want to talk to “passive” candidates, the kind
of people who aren’t reading employment ads and probably don’t even have an
up-to-date resume.
Once when I was a Career Night “expert panelist”
at a university, a graduating senior asked me how to find headhunters. Can you
guess what I told him? I told him that if he finds a headhunter he has just
disqualified himself from working with the headhunter. You don’t find
headhunters, headhunters find you.
Stay tuned for Part Two.
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