Picture this. A 27-year-old internal talent acquisition specialist, or an external third-party recruiter, with a few years of HR and recruitment experience, picks up the phone to call a 55-year-old Vice President who runs a billion-baht company.
The youngsters are reading from a script, nervously asking: “Are you interested in a new job?” while the executive is juggling board meetings, shareholder demands, and market pressures. It’s laughable.
Why would any senior executive take that call seriously? They won’t. They shouldn’t.
They’ll brush it off, hand it to their secretary, or hang up before the second sentence.
There’s no credibility, no authority, no understanding of what it means to headhunt at that level.
A fresh graduate recruiter, in-house or third-party, calling a seasoned executive is like a trainee barista lecturing a Michelin-star chef on how to cook.
This is where professional headhunters step in.
Executives respond to us because we know their world, we’ve been in the boardrooms, and we talk their language.
Respect is earned, not handed out with a job title in HR.
If you want to reach top management, you don’t send in the junior staff with a cold-call script.
You bring in a headhunter who knows how to sit across the table and have a conversation as equals.
When recruitment is often a joke
HR and Talent Acquisition staff are buried in a stack of hiring requisitions, endless paperwork, payroll, employee disputes, and internal policies and compliance nonsense.
Recruitment is often an afterthought, something squeezed in between dealing with sick leave requests and updating policies.
- The recruitment agencies that only invoice clients if their candidate is hired are no different. It’s a well-known fact that these agencies typically fill only 10-20% of the job orders on their desks.
Sadly, these agencies do not willingly inform the clients that 80-90% of the jobs are never completed.
Why not say: “Mr Client, I hope your job is not in the 80-90% so we don’t waste your time. Good luck”.
What happens in reality?
They post the same recycled job ads on LinkedIn and other job boards, wait for desperate candidates to apply, and then pat themselves on the back for “filling the role.”
Meanwhile, the best candidates, the ones who could actually transform the business, never even get a phone call.
Internal staff have no network, no credibility with executives, and no time to run a proper search.
They’re babysitters of the inbox, not headhunters.
By the way, a pet peeve of mine. Please do not call recruitment agencies that shop on the internet for headhunters.
The word “headhunter” is a badge of honor and is earned and well-deserved through years of working in the retained executive search profession. Just like that.
External recruiters live and breathe headhunting
Professional executive search is the exact opposite. We go after people who are not looking, people too busy running businesses to scroll job boards.
We test leadership, dig into track records, measure personality and IQ through science, and know how to influence candidates to move when they’re not thinking about leaving.
That is why smart companies that are serious about leadership roles rely on external search partners.
They want candidates who are not only qualified on paper but who have been thoroughly evaluated, approached, and convinced by someone who knows how to assess leadership talent.
The difference is brutal: HR fills vacancies. Executive search delivers leaders.
