Headhunters divide into four levels:
• High end search. Recruiting for big companies, big names, big salaries, big job titles. Putting Harvey Nash to one side for the moment, the main players in this area include Korn Ferry, Spencer Stuart, Heidrick & Struggles, Russell Reynolds, Egon Zehnder. These are international organisations with a domestic presence in many of the major economies
• Mid tier search. Covers salaries broadly in the £75 - £300K range. Here the headhunter may also supplement headhunting with advertising, either online or print-based. It's worth noting that print-based advertising of executive roles is a feature particular to the UK recruitment market, and is less common overseas.
• Boutiques. These are small organisations operating in niche sectors or functions and sometimes restricted to particular geographic regions. They tend to be owner managed businesses.
• Hybrids.This includes agencies that use headhunting approaches in combination with other types of methodologies but where ‘search’ is not a core competency. Very mixed bunch and usually focused on the junior end.
Harvey Nash operates across the high end and mid tier, so we cover both board level of larger companies as well as the next tier down such as functional heads, CEOs of SMEs etc.