One of my friends (who is not from the corporate world) got quite curious when she read about head-hunters in the City. I suppose she was thinking about Head Hunting as a cultural practise of cutting off the head after killing your opponent or the death of somebody notable. But this, I am afraid, is more to do with recruitment rather than actually hunting heads. My first experience with searching for jobs internationally came way back in 1994 and it was through an advertisement in the Financial Times. But as and how I moved through my career, I figured out that advertisements are only placed for two reasons. When you are not able to find a candidate through a recruitment agency and when the job is very fungible, commodity like but still requires a bit of thinking, (data entry operator, basic business analysis, etc.).
So, from the perspective of a hiring manager, I would call in a bunch of recruitment agencies, and take them through the job description, explaining clearly what I wanted, what I do not want, where I think they can get the candidates, what kind of money we are talking about, etc. From the perspective of a candidate, depending upon the industry, country and skill level, you would prefer to join up with almost every recruitment agency that is operating in your industry. And finally from the perspective of the head hunter, you want your database to have a biggest and baddest collection of candidates. Then you apply data mining tools to dredge the database and search for potential heads.
Some bits of advice. Create a section on your CV which has keywords (such as Foreign Exchange, Banking, risk management, Sun Solaris, credit derivatives, regulatory….), most data mining tools pick up on these keywords. That will move your CV outside the great unwashed herd in the database into the first step.
Second step, make sure that your CV makes sense and flows. Most of the firms here have logic maps and mind maps. If your CV does not flow and make sense, it is automatically rejected. This is to turf out candidates who have lied on their cv or are too much outside the parameters of client’s request. As a rule, lower the level of the job, more restrictive is the criteria. An initial human intervention on cv searches in the west only happens when the job is paying well over £100k annually. It is far too expensive to do it for a junior BA. So make sure that your cv flows, do not lie and get it tested.
Third, do not write a tome. As a rule, 1-2 pages is the most. More senior people can have up to 3-4 pages, but if you cannot explain your life in 1 page, then you are not able to summarise, you are unable to time manage and you are not able to communicate. Mine is 3 pages and I am guilty of each of these faults! Fourth, always remember that the best way to get a job is through your friends and family. So be out there and talk, network, make new friends…
Oh!, btw, being a head-hunter is quite remunerative, as you get 30-100% of the candidate's package as fees. So if you manage to land 5 people at 100k per year, and you are getting 30%, you are happy as Larry! :)
All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!
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