Essay on Headhunters

Almost all of the modern economists agree that human resources form one of the major factors of competitiveness and success both in national and international business. That is the reason why it often comes to untraditional, unethical and even illegal methods of enticing the staff you want in the process of recruitment. One of these methods, aimed mostly at top managers and rare best performing specialists, is called “headhunting” (is also considered to be a type of executive search).

If we search for the meaning of this term, we can easily describe it as a process or a number of actions which are carried out in order to make a person leave his or her former company and work for another one. The main difference between headhunting and other types of recruitment is that in this case the company is looking for a certain specialist or executive with his well-known knowledge, experience and reputation according to the company’s current needs and market situation. The headhunters usually make use of various incentives and tricks – from promising higher salary and better working conditions to threatening and gathering compromising materials. What is typical for all headhunters is that they use individual approach and find out all necessary personal details in order to analyze the person’s motivation and job expectations. After the headhunters find probable ways of attracting the person, they build up personal contacts and start promoting the advantages of working for a new company. Higher salary and new work opportunities often turn out to be very effective in enticing the required people. But what happens if the person is loyal to his or her company and has no serious reasons for leaving it? In this case the headhunters usually try to influence the worker’s family and relatives or find other interesting solutions. For example, I’ve recently read of an incident, showing the lively imagination of the headhunters. A manufacturing company was eager to entice one of the best competitor’s designers and paid a large sum of money to a headhunting agency so that they made this designer change his mind and join the company. However, the person was very hard to convince and as the result one of the headhunters started to call the company as the designer’s dentist and managed to gather so much information from his colleagues and secretary that the designer had to sue this headhunting agency for breaking into his private life.

To my mind, it is impossible to say, whether headhunting is good or bad and whether it has only negative or positive consequences for the companies and their workers. The final result depends only on the level of ethics both in the companies and in the headhunting agencies. Anyway, this process has already become an integral part of the modern business.