Job applications going nowhere? Get yourself a headhunter

If movies and TV shows and stories from your parents are to be trusted, getting a job used to be easy. You’d sit down at the kitchen table, circle HELP WANTED postings in the newspaper with a big marker, make a few phone calls, and that was that. A new job! A big paycheck! Life was simple.

Applying for a job is still relatively easy — maybe easier than ever. Just upload your résumé to any bottomless portal. But getting a job is a whole different ball game. LinkedIn is dense with fake jobs, and the tech job market in particular feels as unpredictable as, say, trying to be a journalist. In a field like tech, where the big-name companies (Google! Meta! Microsoft!) can afford to wait till they’ve found the best of the best, what’s left for the figurative and literal rest?

Besides relentlessly applying to job postings, job hunters have a more expensive option: working with a headhunter. “Are recruiters worth it?” a user in a Reddit thread for computer-science-career questions asked. “Headhunters still a thing?” asked another in a thread for recruiting. “How do headhunters work?” another asked. The consensus? It depends.

First things first: it’s important to know the difference between a recruiter and a headhunter. Companies often use recruiters to find job candidates; headhunters work for you to find pathways to jobs. Because companies employ recruiters, the companies also pay the recruiters. Working with a recruiter should cost nothing to a job applicant. A headhunter, on the other hand, works for you: you will have to pay them a percentage of the annual salary of whatever gig they help you get.

For those engaging the skills of a headhunter, it can be pricey. Indeed said the average headhunter fee is 20 to 25% of a first year’s salary — a hefty price, especially if someone’s been on the market for a while. According to Aldebaran Recruiting, a recruiting and headhunting firm in San Diego, some firms are offering fees as low as 15% of a first year’s salary to attract clients.

Bryan Smith, a lawyer who works in tech, has been on the job hunt for a little over half a year. He was lucky enough to connect with a recruiter as he started to apply to jobs. “Most of the firms won’t publicly post their job openings, but they will send them out to recruiters who will do the legwork of screening candidates,” he said. “My recruiter had a job opening posted that I emailed him about and he asked for my résumé, gave me a call, and said basically, ‘OK, I’ll represent you.’”

Smith and his recruiter haven’t found him a new job yet, but he’s happy to remain at his current one until he finds a new fit. In the meantime, the recruiter works at no cost to Smith. “I don’t pay anything. I think because I’m a relatively junior attorney it’s only (“only”) like $25,000 to the recruiter if I get hired,” he said, specifying that the recruiter’s paycheck comes from the company itself rather than out of his own pocket. Would he use a headhunter if things got a little more urgent? “If I was unemployed and wanted to cover as many bases as possible, I’d definitely consider it,” Smith said.

Rob Barnett, a headhunter in New York, told me that his work goes beyond just finding someone a job. It’s maybe more apt to consider a headhunter a kind of life coach. “Most job seekers write the same standard, boring letters filled with buzzwords and a virtual repeat of the same information found on the résumé,” he said “These presentations fail to show the company you've taken the time to research their business and focus the pitch on what's most important to their present-day needs — with proof that you have specific insights and solutions to offer.”

The modern world of recruiting and headhunting — aka “executive search” — goes back to WWII, when companies had to fill skilled positions left by those who joined the war effort. Employment agencies helped backfill the job market and position those unfit for service into careers that could sustain a family during a time of strife. By the 1970s, the executive-search field was robust enough to be its own industry, bringing in future recruiters and headhunters. Prepandemic, there were about 25,000 staffing and recruiting companies in the US.

Christian Owens, a web developer, said he’s gone up to eight months on the market between gigs. For him, “the tech-employment market is a frustrating environment that requires its inhabitants to be on the computer constantly,” he told me. “Any half-decent software-engineering job posting on LinkedIn is going to have several hundred applicants within 24 hours.” In this environment, paying someone to shepherd your résumé through the crowd can be worthwhile. And the advantage of using a headhunter is that they’re only paid once you get a job. Barnett — who declined to say how much his services cost — said a lot of candidates find that their time between jobs averages 90 days. 

Owens said he would fork over 10% of his first year’s salary for a headhunter who could consistently land client interviews. After five months on the market, Owens got a salaried position through an open job posting. Maybe it’s that simple after all.

Fran Hoepfner is a writer in New York City.