Recruitment

Recruitment covers manager and specialist hiring in the layer below your executives, run as one program to one standard of evidence instead of role by role. Headhunting is the search for a single senior role. Both start from the same place: what the role has to be worth to the business, measured rather than described.

More than it appears, because in most companies nobody adds it up. A failed manager or specialist hire costs the fee, the ramp, the work that did not get done and the team that carried the gap for a year. Multiply that by the number of such hires made last year and you have a figure your board has never seen.

Because hiring a group one role at a time produces a group chosen by different standards, and the company pays for the difference. Recruitment applies one definition of "good enough" to every role in the group rather than reinventing it per hire, including the roles filled fastest, which are usually the ones nobody re-examines. Every name on a shortlist comes with the evidence behind it.

Often not. Much of what looks like a shortage of candidates is the company's own process: a slow stage, an interview that tells the candidate nothing, an offer that arrives after the decision was made elsewhere.

One consultant owns a Recruitment mandate from the brief to the signed offer and is the person you talk to throughout, with research support for the market map. You are not handed to an account manager once the work begins. You also receive structured interviews, the notes behind every recommendation, and a reason for each candidate you did not see.