Can headhunter help you land good UAE job?

Like them or loathe them, but at least once in our lifetime, we will have to work with a headhunter to help us land a job.

Many professionals/candidates believe the job of a headhunter has been considerably reduced now with all the social networking sites cropping up and the employers themselves resorting to the online medium looking for potential employees.

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, recently released the top five most important long-term recruiting trends emerging across the world and, as expected, professional networks are the most important and frequented place that employers come to looking for candidate.

But, does it or does it not determine the importance and influence of recruitment agents in the job market, whether it’s the UAE or elsewhere? Let’s see what they have to say.

“All headhunters get asked this question,” agrees A Athawale, a recruitment expert, and he firmly believes they still play a vital role to play when it comes to hiring.

“Companies hire professional headhunters to find the best talent in the market and that is a full-time job. Companies also don’t want to appear to be poaching from their competitors and hiring a professional makes it a lot easier to map out the market for talent.

“The benefit of hiring a headhunter outweighs the costs,” he says while defining the role of a   headhunter.

“He knows the key players in the market right from a company’s culture to individuals who make a difference. Headhunters have long-term relationships with clients and candidates in the markets they operate in and maintain the highest level of confidentiality when it comes to tapping senior level executives. These executives build companies or help turn around underperforming ones. When you add all that up, it comes up with a cost, which is the fee that the headhunter charges. Well worth it, wouldn't you say?” he argues.

Agrees Caroline Gentles, Senior Consultant at Cobalt HR Consultancy. She believes “the word headhunting is often incorrectly applied to all types of recruitment. However, it actually means finding and proactively approaching candidates who may not be looking for a new role as part of an executive search process. People often assume that executive search and contingency recruitment are one and the same. However, they are two very different processes,” she explains.

And there’s more to the job than meets the eye. “Headhunting/executive search is a much more challenging and time-intensive process that produces candidates who are exactly matched to a role. Contingency recruitment tends to be simpler and more straightforward in that candidates are sourced through advertising or already sitting on a database. The next time you meet someone who claims to be a headhunter, ask them how they source their candidates and you may find they are not a headhunter at all,” she adds.

“If they were not, then recruitment would not be the multi-billion dollar industry it is today and they would not get business from their clients,” sums up Hasnain Qazi, Middle East Business Manager at Huxley Associates.

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