From The Headhunter's Desk: Understanding your headhunter

By definition, headhunters are given the difficult-to-fill positions, and this is where they excel. They have the capacity to find talented candidates and direct them to your office. These candidates will typically be accomplishers, currently employed, with good futures where they are. It is your job to attract them to your firm.

Candidates are not only a perishable commodity, but they are also the only product known to speak, and they can say no to being "sold" to a client. Better candidates are quickly turned off by unresponsiveness, which is interpreted as a lack of initiative or seriousness on the part of the hiring company. Resumes may look like a pile of paperwork on your desk but they should never be dismissed as such. Each resume represents a real person who has been cultivated, screened and convinced that his or her best interests lie in meeting your company.

After you have interviewed the candidates, discuss the outcome with the headhunter. Time kills all deals, so a quick response is needed to the resumes on the shortlist. It is vital that the candidates do not have to wait for weeks. Not knowing is very unsettling. We all know the feeling when sitting in an aircraft five minutes after we should have taken off. With no announcement from the captain, we begin to speculate about what bad things may have happened.

Through our advanced search process, we have matched your required profile with appropriate candidates and have already progressed beyond the screening process. For you to say, simply, that a candidate is not qualified and that you need to see more does not help a lot. If we don't receive feedback on why a candidate is not a fit, we will not be able to avoid passing the same type of candidate to you again in the future.

Headhunters understand that both clients' priorities and job profiles can change. However, it is important that you communicate these changes so that the headhunter's sourcing and screening techniques can be altered according to the new information. In this way, we can guard against wasting your time with unqualified candidates and wasting our time trying to find them. A few minutes of your time are an investment that will save you a good deal of time down the road.

Headhunters handle job offers and acceptances all the time. This requires careful documentation. Requests for offer confirmations, start dates and other written confirmations should not be regarded as a sign of distrust, but rather as a sign of professionalism.

Headhunters should never be cut out of the appointment process in mid-stream, as this will only prevent us from passing on "inside knowledge", of the kind a candidate is inclined to share only with the headhunter. This information and further consultation with the headhunter can be valuable when preparing an offer.

Tom Sorensen is a headhunter and partner at Grant Thornton in Thailand. He may be contacted at tom@gt-thai.com. Learn more at www.grantthornton.co.th.