Finding the right candidate, one who can deliver material impact on your company’s operational and financial results, means identifying and engaging exceptional candidates. Wouldn’t it make sense that selecting the right headhunter for the job will make a material difference in how that all turns out?

Who is actually going to conduct my executive search?

Most executive recruiting firms are structured along the same lines as accountants and lawyers: senior partners get paid for bringing you on board as a client and then hand off the actual work to junior associates and analysts. Partners have quotas and often focus more on sales targets instead of figuring out if final candidates for your Vice President, Global Operations position are really a great fit.

True, if yours is a high-profile, high-dollar-value project, a name partner may actually be very hands-on. For that search. But this is not common, and so in that case, you might want to understand how much recruiting vs. selling expertise that partner brings to the table. He may not have actually done much recruiting in recent years.

You should ask to meet the people who will actually conduct the search – represent your company and position to candidates; screen, interview and evaluate candidates; contact and engage references; help you make your final candidate selection. Are these individuals well-trained and equipped to do the work, particularly if you’re headhunting for a senior-level leadership role?

And if it turns out you don’t really like the person(s) with whom you’re working, can you pick someone else?

How many other searches is my headhunter working at the same time; how high is my priority?

Headhunting is a people business, yet it’s become intensely transaction driven. What’s supposed to be a highly personalized, custom-built and delivered relationship experience, turns into a cookie-cutter process with warmed-over candidates from another search or pulled from an aged database. Why?

Because, as most recruiters will tell you, they’ll take on as many searches as they can find. Then, assuming they ARE doing the recruiting themselves, they wind up running five, six or more projects simultaneously. That means multitasking, which turns into juggling, then devolves into struggling. As a client you might rightly ask: “What about my specific requirements? The carefully crafted position profile? The things we told you about our values, corporate culture, business goals and objectives? How much attention, mindshare am I getting here?”

There is no magic number, but you need to know how many other clients are competing for your headhunter’s capacity: the expertise, time and energy that might otherwise be invested in your executive search. So ask.

What are your off-limits restrictions and conflicts of interest?

Off-Limits

If you retain an executive recruiter to conduct your executive search for a new Chief Operating Officer, it would be bad form, unethical in my opinion, to see that recruiter (or another member of that search firm) turn around and recruit away one of your own executives for another client. Which is why reputable headhunters adhere to “hands-off’ policies.

Off-limits simply means that your headhunter is not able to recruit a specific potential candidate who you’d like to consider for the position you need to fill because of their hands-off policy.

When executive recruiting firms dominate an industry or sector, those firms exponentially increase the odds that they’ll encounter off-limits situations. In some cases, as much as 50% to 60% of the executive talent pools in certain markets are out-of-bounds. This means you won’t have access to at least some of the very best talent you want to recruit.

You deserve to be confident that your headhunter can reach far and wide to bring only the best and most interesting candidates to your negotiating table. And about his off-limits policy with respect to your company as well; and be sure to put up the “no-poaching” sign.

Conflicts

If you watched that great TV series about New York’s 1960s advertising industry you probably recall that an agency would be conflicted if it attempted to pitch the TWA and Pan American accounts simultaneously. Law firms don’t represent both sides in litigation. And it’s a conflict of interest for a recruiter to recruit the top operations executive for BMW and Mercedes Benz at the same time.

If an individual recruiter is conducting your search for a new Chief Transformation Officer, and has also accepted another CTO engagement – even if that organization is not your direct competitor – there’s a strong chance the profiles and qualifications for both roles will be similar.

How does he decide which client is presented with a particularly strong candidate? Who gets first “dibs” on the best talent? How would you feel if you never got a shot at the first-round draft choice?

The larger the firm, or the more concentrated its work in your industry, the greater the potential for this sort of conflict. Imagine even a relatively small firm of only five partners specializing in retail. One partner is conducting the search for Nordstrom’s Chief Supply Chain Officer, while the other four are doing the same work for Macy’s, Target, Home Depot and Costco. Which client gets the A-Player? Why all of them, of course.

Multiply the potential for this sort of conflict within the largest recruiting companies serving the Fortune 1000. And find out who gets first dibs.

Let’s start a conversation.