How Headhunters Recruit – and What Their Methods Mean for Those Being Hunted

JOB MARKET

By Jennifer C. Berkshire

When Kelly Parisi received a call from a headhunter last winter, changing jobs was the last thing on her mind.

Ms. Parisi, then the director of communications at the Ms. Foundation for Women, in New York, was content in her position and deeply committed to her employer’s mission of supporting economic opportunities for women and girls. But as she learned more about the open position — vice president of communications at the American Foundation for the Blind — Ms. Parisi found herself feeling tempted. “It seemed like a wonderful next step as far as what I wanted to do.”

She conveyed her interest to the recruiter, Heyman Associates, in New York, which in turn began to woo and pursue her through a series of phone and face-to-face interviews. Before long, Ms. Parisi had made it into the trio of handpicked finalists. And in January, just three months after she’d received the initial call, Ms. Parisi made it over the final hurdle: The job was hers. “I’d received calls from headhunters before, but this was the first job I’d expressed an interest in,” she says. “I couldn’t resist.”

Welcome to the fast-paced world of professional recruiting. Long a staple of the for-profit hiring process, headhunters have become increasingly common in the nonprofit job market as well. Major search companies such as Korn/Ferry International and Russell Reynolds Associates have their own nonprofit divisions, while dozens of niche recruiters that deal exclusively with the nonprofit world have emerged during the last decade. Charities have quickly caught on to what their for-profit counterparts have known for some time: A professional search conducted by an outsider can turn up a far larger pool of qualified applicants in a shorter period of time than the in-house model.

But for those on the other end of the search, potential candidates who earnestly pass along résumés and submit to a rigorous screening process, the experience of being recruited can be disquieting. For every winning candidate like Ms. Parisi, the professional recruiter leaves behind dozens, even hundreds, of the not-so-lucky: individuals who are invited to apply, systematically vetted, then unceremoniously dumped. To them — and to job seekers who have never been headhunted at all — the role of the hired search company can seem at best mysterious, at worst, ominous.

Narrowing the Pool

In a typical search for an executive-level position at a nonprofit organization, a recruiter may invite as many as 500 people to apply for the job, or to recommend others who might be qualified candidates. Assembling this teeming cast of prospects, say headhunters, gives them access to a range of diverse and qualified applicants. The next stage, which begins almost as soon as the résumés have arrived, is to eliminate as many candidates as possible.

“The search process has a couple of stages,” says Larry Slesinger, a recruiter in Washington who works exclusively with nonprofit clients. “First I define the job and write the announcement, then I start spreading the word. All of a sudden I have 150 applicants, and they all think they’re right for the job. The third phase is to narrow the pool.”

And that’s when things get serious, he notes: “The narrowing is a critically important phase. No one has time to interview 150 people.” To separate the wheat from the chaff, he relies on recommendations, the judgment of people he knows and trusts. But he’s the first to admit that the process is deeply subjective. “I might be wrong,” he says. “I’m sure there is someone more talented, but if my client finds one person they want and that person wants the job, then I’ve done my job.”

Lois Lindauer, a recruiter in Boston, starts with an even larger pool of potential candidates: an in-house database of more than 9,000 experts in fund raising, the field in which her company specializes. In her hunt for the right person, Ms. Lindauer supplements the list using every tool available to the professional recruiter. She places ads in publications and on Web sites that advertise nonprofit jobs, haunts online databases of nonprofit organizations such as GuideStar, and checks in with professional contacts in hopes of being led to more candidates.

From that huge pool, a grueling selection process ultimately produces a slate of just a handful of hopefuls. Ms. Lindauer says that when it comes to screening applicants, putting professional judgment before personal feelings can be a challenge. “The more you like the person, the harder your questions have to be,” she says. “Our job isn’t to put forward the candidate that we like the most, but the one who’ll be the best for the position.”

Deep Background

For the people fielding those hard questions, however, the search process can prove to be downright unpleasant. One candidate for an executive-level nonprofit job, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed alarm at the sheer volume of information the search agent seemed to know about her: “They were asking me about my work history going back 15, even 20 years,” she says. “I felt like they were digging for exact dates.”

Intrusive, perhaps, but all in the course of a day’s work for a thorough recruiter. Before Ms. Lindauer’s company even contemplates recommending a candidate, the prospect must undergo a triple round of reference checking, in which everything — work history, character, and educational background — is given a thorough going over. And when the firm does put forward a final slate, the candidates come with a pedigree: written summaries of the prospects’ careers, their strengths and weaknesses, and the recruiter’s reasons why the candidates are considered suitable for the position.

That level of investigation can pay off for the candidate as well, says Ms. Parisi. She notes that in the past, she often received inquiries from headhunters who hadn’t done their homework. “I’d be called about positions that were markedly different from what I was currently doing,” she says. But this time was different. When she received the call from Heyman Associates, the company already knew all about her. “They reviewed my background before they approached me. They knew I had the right skill set for the position.”

Such knowledge can be essential, notes Ms. Parisi, when the position being filled is specialized, such as communications or fund raising. In those cases, she says, a professional recruiter may have an advantage over employers who run their own searches. “Often the media specialist is the only person in the [nonprofit] organization with those skills,” she says. “That means that there might not be anyone internally who can ask the right questions during the hiring process. A search firm that specializes in media can screen candidates and be really effective.”

Culture Clash

Effective or not, the cool, calculating ethos of the professional search is often at odds with the more personal culture that characterizes many nonprofit organizations. That clash can be particularly evident when large search firms that specialize in for-profit placement are retained to fill positions at charities.

Decision making is a key part of nonprofit culture, says Ronald Gallagher, the internship coordinator at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. A well-run charity, he notes, “tries to be as inclusive as possible, soliciting input from all the staff.” That’s much different from the typical business-world model, which is driven by a hierarchy, he says.

A lack of understanding about nonprofit culture can lead recruiters to select candidates who lack the skills and temperament to thrive in that environment. Worst-case scenario: a mismatch that spells disaster for both the new employee and the charity. Tim Wolfred, director of Executive Leadership Services, the recruiting division of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, in San Francisco, describes one search he witnessed in which a candidate from an entrepreneurial background was hired to replace the founder of a nonprofit organization: “He came in, ran roughshod over the place and was gone in six months. It was not a good fit.”

While boutique firms that specialize in nonprofit placement are typically engaged in a handful of searches at anyone time — Mr. Slesinger, for example, is currently in the midst of four searches — a large recruiter serving both for-profit and nonprofit clients may be seeking to fill hundreds of positions simultaneously. Sometimes the sheer volume of business handled by major headhunters can lend an impersonal air to the search itself.

Debra J. Thomas, director of public relations at the Jesse J. Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University, in Houston, has long been acquainted with headhunters — they’ve been calling her since she landed her first academic job more than 15 years ago. Recently she had an unpleasant experience with a major search firm that has made her wary of recruiters.

“I was contacted about a position that I wasn’t interested in, but I recommended some other people,” recalls Ms. Thomas. “Having said that I didn’t want to be a candidate, I later received a form rejection letter addressed to the person I’d recommended.” And when she contacted the recruiter to complain, she got nowhere. “They didn’t seem to know whether they’d sent the letter or not, and they never apologized,” she says. “I wasn’t impressed with that at all.”

Ms. Thomas attributes the incident to a kind of cultural misunderstanding. “I’ve never worked in the corporate world,” she says. “It may be that manners are different. But if a search firm is going to go into the academic market, they need to learn our mores. People can get turned off by the search company when they might love the institution for whom they’d be working.”

Still Searching

With culture clash seemingly inevitable, should nonprofit organizations simply forgo the professional search in favor of conducting their own search? Absolutely not, says Mr. Gallagher, who believes that outside recruiters can be of great help to a nonprofit organization in many circumstances. “Many nonprofit groups tend to be very haphazard when it comes to hiring people,” he says. “They scramble to fill a job when someone leaves, but they don’t necessarily take the time to evaluate the kind of person they’re in need of. They’re just desperate to fill the position.”

As for the ruthless screening process to which headhunters submit potential candidates, he says he understands the need for that, too — and he’s even experienced it firsthand. “I’ve interviewed for university jobs being handled by headhunters,” he says. “They do a great service to the organization by prescreening. They know what they’re looking for. For the school, that meant that after the headhunter cut [the list] down, the school could look at a smaller number of candidates.” Mr. Gallagher didn’t get the job, but he came away feeling impressed nonetheless. “These people are very skilled,” he says. “It showed me what the possibilities are.”

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