Googling for Headhunters... and Finding Fakes - Jobs
Welcome to Ask The Headhunter on FastCompany.com! Many thanks to Linda Tischler for kicking this off with excerpts from my book in her article Five Burning Questions About How to Work With Headhunters.
Learning how to work with a good headhunter can be a positive, career-changing step. But beware the dark side of "headhunters."
Headhunters sometimes poison their own well, but it's also poisoned by misinformation and by "services" that masquerade as headhunters. Too often, people are left scratching their heads. Here's how to tell the good ones from the bad ones from the fake ones.
First, the fakes. When legit headhunters try to defend their business, they often don't realize they're defending against an attack of imposters. Google "headhunter." What comes up?
Among the paid Google placements is what appears to be a headhunting company, Lucas Group. I know nothing about them other than what I see on their homepage. Then I see two more paid placements of "headhunters": TheLadders and Monster.com.
Thank you, Google, but if TheLadders and Monster are headhunters, then I'm a living, breathing job board. No wonder headhunting has a lousy reputation. When any of the two million searchers clicks on a mislabeled link and finds himself served up a multi-level-marketing scam "job," or every time TheLadders charges a job hunter for "membership" and claims to deliver "only $100k+ jobs" (while Ladders customers cry foul) good headhunters get stuck defending themselves.
Why does Google sell ads for the term "headhunter" to advertisers that are clearly not headhunters? I asked them that, and I still don't know because Google doesn't answer.
But skip the ads. Let's go to the search results for some real headhunting firms.
No. 1 result: CareerBuilder, a job board owned by newspapers.
No. 2 result: a directory of headhunters. Okay, I'll buy that.
No. 3 result: Another job board, headhunters.com, with a feature column about cash-for-clunkers on the homepage.
Out of the top 10 Google results are two related to headhunters, a third that's a site written by a headhunter (yours truly)... and a bunch of marine toilet vendors. (Head. Get it?) At least seven out of ten of the "headhunter" results, and two of three paid placements, have nothing to do with headhunters.
Forget the marine toilets. Job hunters who flock to Monster.com, TheLadders, CareerBuilder and other job boards inevitably find... "headhunters" trolling for resumes using "job postings." The problem is, good headhunters don't do that. These are fakes, paying for Google placement and for search engine optimization that buys them clicks... and a lot of suckers.
Think I'm over-reacting? Try this article: TheLadders: Paying for kaka. Now on Google. For a while, TheLadders bought up virtually every search term connected with the word "headhunter."
Yeah, headhunters often behave like bad dogs and hurt their reps. But the industry's biggest mistake is that it has allowed big advertising money and rich job boards to commandeer its reputation.
The general public--even some sophisticated execs--thinks it's dealing with headhunters when it's dealing with fakes. Buyer beware and all that, but I have a big axe to grind with Google, CareerBuilder, Monster, and TheLadders. They're getting rich and probably fleecing job hunters and employers alike.
So, where do you find real headhunters?
Stay tuned. In upcoming posts, we'll discuss your questions about headhunters... job hunting, hiring, recruiting, negotiating salary and more!
Nick Corcodilos is the author of How to Work with Headhunters. He also writes the free weekly Ask The Headhunter Newsletter. Ask The Headhunter is a registered trademark.
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