Q4.5 2024

Come rain or shine, boom or bust, headhunters are the first to shout about why the market needs headhunters. LinkedIn is basically one big Your Country Needs You poster, if it had been altered to reorient Kitchener’s finger in his own direction with the caption changed to Your Business Needs Us.

Having said that, there is no escaping the fact that banks are under immense pressure to cut costs in today’s challenging economic environment. Throughout 2023 and 2024, capital markets activity was down, M&A took a hit, and Leveraged Finance slowed. This pressure seeps into every division and business area – we see reduced travel of MDs, periodic hiring freezes, and a reluctance to engage headhunters department wide.

Banks take the global view: looking at the aggregate annual cost of headhunted candidates rather than the one-off annual headhunting costs per team. Consequently, it is a difficult job for internal recruiters to manage their relationships with headhunters when global policy mandates hiring be done in-house as much as possible. Hiring heads must prove internally that they have embarked upon a lengthy and fruitless search before utilising external search agencies to fill headcount.

Now, it is undeniable that there are cost implications to engage search agencies, but the question remains: does avoiding these cost implications save money and/or boost performance in the long-term?

Well, making the right hire can radically increase a team’s transaction volume over the mid-to-long term on the business side and can save a bank a drastic amount of capital on the middle and back-office side. On the flip side, hires that don’t go to plan can cost capital in unrealised success, but also in the time and resources spent during the subsequent hiring process.

So how do specialist headhunters increase the chance of the right hire?

Network

Headhunters build up comprehensive market networks of both active and passive talent. They can leverage these networks for references – the holy grail when it comes to placements. References often introduce headhunters to opaque but strong talent who do not have full profiles online, but who come with a seal of approval from trusted sources. Internal teams, who often stand over broader hiring jurisdictions and verticals, find it challenging to develop deep market-specific networks to the extent that agencies can. Moreover, churn rates within internal hiring teams are high, as individuals tend to look to pivot into other business HR functions, which further stunts the opportunities available to build expansive talent networks internally.

Market Access

Headhunters are perennially in the market, their feet on the ground and their ears to the street, whereas internal recruitment teams enter and withdraw from the market in line with roles that require filling. Often, this means that headhunters will have a grasp on where the market is, where to look for talent, and in many cases, they come armed with warm talent that can radically expedite a hiring process that may have already spanned a period of months.

Data and Insight

Specialist headhunters can provide accurate and real-time data around compensation benchmarking, competitor insights and the state of the market more generally to augment the hiring process. These insights can be the difference between a successful hire and an unsuccessful one; between providing a candidate with a compelling offer or one that is comparatively sub-par. Often, internal hiring teams are under significant time-pressure and may have access only to internal data, rather than competitor data, especially competitor data that spans the breadth and extent that headhunters collect.

Trust

A significant portion of hiring managers have themselves been headhunted at some point and are consequently aware of the significant impacts that good headhunting can have on a team’s performance in the mid-to-long term. By developing strong relationships with preferred headhunters, internal hiring managers can ensure that their searches are aligned with their needs and carried out by trusted figures.

Eversearch provides executive search and modern talent solutions exclusively to the risk and finance sectors.

We are true sector specialists and partner with a select group of core financial services clients that demand best-in-class talent. Many of our clients have partnered with us over several years. We are an extension of their in-house talent strategy and are trusted advisors. We know their operations well and have great instincts on how to navigate challenging talent pools to deliver consistent results.

Risk has emerged as one of the most important business functions across complex financial services institutions. While many of our competitors now cover the sector, our differentiators are our depth of experience, thorough insights, and proven ability to deliver on otherwise hard-to-find talent.