Confessions from the City: The headhunter

Big headline on the front of a paper’s business section: Jane Bloggs appointed CEO of FTSE 100 Plc. Everyone nods sagely — what a wonderful appointment. But few know what happened behind the scenes.

There are up to 60 search firms operating in the market. Some are very large and specialise in CFOs, CEOs etc but the boutiques are more generalist.

We all work on a retained basis, so we operate exclusively on behalf of a client to identify their next “X”.

The first part of the story is being asked to take on that assignment. The money’s good too. Most headhunters work on a third of first-year salary and expected bonus, which will easily top £500,000 for a FTSE boss.

Given the appointments we help make will often be the most important thing the company does that year, the trust placed in you is enormous. And you tend to trust people you have built a long and deep relationship with.

So we spend a lot of time with people over their careers, as candidates and clients, proving why we can be trusted — or not.

In my first week in recruitment, someone asked my advice on what their salary should be.

I told them and they marched off to tell their CEO what they now felt they should be on. The next day, they rang me to explain what they had done and thank me for my advice.

My heart stopped. They could have been fired. The seriousness of what we do and the impact we can have has never left me.

Then the focus turns to finding the ideal candidate. The market breaks down into two groups, people we already know (the infamous little black book) and people we don’t, who we then headhunt.

We assess people on CV, competence, personality, fit with the organisation and — in many ways, the most important — our personal judgment based on years of experience.

Being able to match personalities and assess whether someone will fit the culture today but also help grow the organisation is multi-layered and incredibly complex. My emotional intelligence is tested every day.

We might start with 150 people, interview 20 and short-list five. So we get 150 excited and disappoint 149. We must never forget that and be sensitive to how that feels. It’s incredibly fulfilling but also daunting: if we get things wrong it’s serious.

Before you start feeling sorry for us, don’t forget, I work in an industry where my CEO said to me on day two: “it’s not bad to have a KPI of how many lunches you have bought people each month.”

Still, you build a better relationship in a relaxed environment than a formal one. And lunch is better than an interview.