Is executive search still reserved for recruitment agencies?

2020-03-23

Direct and executive search - a recruitment agency thing?

For a long time, direct and executive search was something only headhunters did, usually working out of recruitment agencies. The premise is simple: instead of posting a job ad and waiting, you go out and contact specific people. Executive search narrows that down to managerial roles and specialists who are genuinely hard to find.

How are candidates actually found?

The usual channels:

outreach via social networks, e.g., LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook
cold-calling companies directly
meeting people at conferences
personal networks and referrals

Why employers started doing it themselves

There was a time when directly poaching someone from another company felt ethically murky, so employers outsourced that work to agencies. Someone else did the uncomfortable part.

But once LinkedIn became mainstream, the whole mystique around executive search dissolved. Add sourcing tools, modern ATS systems like Element, and the internet in general, and the “secret knowledge” stopped being secret. Today, in-house HR teams do this routinely, not just recruitment agencies.

IT was where this shift happened first, and honestly, it would have been strange if it hadn’t:

Demand for developers exploded, and traditional job postings stopped cutting it;
Developers live online – they’re on LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow – which makes them relatively easy to find and message;
IT recruiters were already comfortable with digital tools, so picking up sourcing felt natural.

In my view, it comes down to two things. LinkedIn made it trivially easy to reach employees at other companies, and the growing shortage of candidates made it necessary. Executive search is no longer the exclusive domain of recruitment agencies – and it hasn’t been for a while now.