HR and headhunters–an uneasy alliance

When people talk about headhunters, you often hear them referred to in rather snippy tones “a necessary evil”, “snake-oil salesmen”, “bucketshops”, “in it for the money but no idea what they’re doing”, “a waste of time”.

At the same time, HR still has that awful moniker of Human Remains, and remarks about HR are as unfortunate. “Oh, look out, here comes HR—everyone shut up”, “Great, another training and development session—no way I’ll go this time, a waste of money and time”, “all they do is take care of the expat issues, as if that really matters”, “an overhead, and they don’t contribute to the bottom line in any way”.

There are plenty of people in low-level recruit, who besmirch the search industry, which is analogous to most practices that do not have a barrier to entry. Such people may be great at cold calls and sales, but are not good when it comes to talent assessment.

There are plenty of HR people at a low-level who justify their job by getting the cheapest company they can find, or hiring someone cheaper than the other, and saying they have just saved the company XX$, which is not good, nor practical HR. But such functionaries populate large HR teams.

The truth is, if there is one group that truly understands what the challenges of HR are, it is the search people. After all, they are after the same end goal; finding and keeping top talent, and grooming the good ones to the next level.

Why then, is there such animus between the two? Or if not animus, distrust. When I first started in search, an old-timer looked at me and said, “Remember, HR is the enemy.” “Nonsense,” I said. Yet, over the years, I can say that many of the HR people I’ve encountered are loath to talk to me—yet we do the same thing.

A good, strong and strategic HR person is worth their weight in gold, and I have had the pleasure of collaborating with them. You then have a partnership where everyone contributes, and it works, without question. But they are far and few between, and would likely say the same thing about headhunters.

I’m going to ask the people I know in HR what they want from headhunters, and share some stories of HR and search gone bad—that should not be hard..