Know Your Agency: What Do Headhunters Like Most About Their Job?

Ever wondered what headhunters do all day? Their habits, thoughts, and reasons for doing what they do? Well, curious ourselves, last spring we got up close and personal with roughly 100 BountyJobs headhunters about a slew of topics.

The 100 headhunters responded to a 50 question survey sent to a random sample of recruiting agencies active on BountyJobs. We’ll admit our main goal was selfish: we wanted to gain insight to improve the agency side of the BountyJobs platform.

But, like a sparkly unicorn appearing when you least expect it, after analyzing the results, we realized our efforts held a lot more insight than we originally intended. Not only did we get answers about how headhunters use BountyJobs, we also got information on how they recruit that may be useful to others in the industry.

Useful enough to make a full report. Which we plan on doing, but not just yet. You’ll have to wait a few months to get the full report and see the upgrade to the BountyJobs platform. For now, however, we can start leaving little bits of cheese (AKA: our favorite tidbits of insight) for all of you little reader mice to follow.

Today’s big question? What’s your favorite thing about recruiting?

What do Headhunters Like Most About their Job?

For many, what comes to mind when they think of headhunters falls somewhere between a swashbuckling loner thirsty for the thrill of the chase or that of a trusted adviser who values collaboration above everything else. No matter what you imagine, the top three answers we got in our survey will likely surprise you.

Playing matchmaker.

Taken aback? We weren’t. We work with these guys all day. We knew they had a soft spot for customers, we just didn’t know how big it was. A whopping 53% of those surveyed cited this as their top joy in headhunting (tweet this). Here is what a few said directly.

“To be honest, for me, it’s the happiness I give a candidate when I find them their perfect job and they are happy. I love hearing from my clients, “thank you so much, we love your candidate.”

and

“Making a good match that makes a person’s or a family’s life better. Making the customer more successful because of the people I put in place.”

Cold, Hard Cash.

This answer finished a distant second, with only 20% citing money as what they love about their job (tweet this). Many assume this is the ONLY reason headhunters do their job, but our survey results indicate matchmaking is much more important. Still, you’ll always have those doing it for the piles of moolah. As one agency put it (when asked what was important),

“receiving large checks (chuckle)”

and another

“Making a placement and getting a check in excess of 15K.”

The thrill of the hunt.

17% said they loved the thrill of hunting both jobs and candidates (tweet this). Now this fits the popular image of the swashbuckler. What did 17% say they loved about being a headhunter? Well, it’s simply put with,

“The CHASE!!!!”

Surprised? Maybe not. You might think cash, in the form of big checks, big fees and big jobs, trumps everything for a headhunter, but we’re happy to see that headhunters value the work that they do beyond the money it brings in. Perhaps the best quote from a headhunter to sum it all up was,

“I get to profoundly change someones life with a new job and get paid for it!”

Want to know more of what the headhunters had to say? Come back to the BountyJobs blog over the next couple weeks to see more bits of cheese from our headhunter survey, and stay tuned for the full report sometime over the next few months.

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