by Casey-Leigh Hethers

Created on: August 18, 2010

The two terms used are often transferable, with recruiter primarily dictating the capacity of an actual employee of a company, located within the human resources (HR) department. Their role may or may not be exclusively to fill the objective of managing the hiring and firing of employees; in smaller to medium sized companies, many recruiters will also be tasked with general HR responsibilities, while larger companies will have both the finances available and the actual need to have someone focused entirely on the job of recruitment. A headhunter is a slang term, which many who are referred to with this title find offense at. Typically, it indicates a third party recruiter - either freelance or an employment agency - that actively pursues candidates of interest to a company.

Fictional headhunters are often portrayed on screen in television and movies as being tasked with sourcing new talent for sports teams from school and college students. Beyond this, their main source of activity lies with finding the employees that a corporation needs by filtering out the best candidates from the many individuals who apply. Dependent on their location and competition, the services that are offered to clients range from general to specialised services or from a particular industry or employee type. Generally, headhunters will rely on a network of contacts, which has both its advantages (when certain vacancies come up, they will be able to react with someone in mind) and disadvantages (the limitations are likely to be found when working from a list of pre-determined names).

Third party recruiters - or headhunters - operate using a variety of services: retained search, delimited/engaged search or a contingent search. Retained searches tend to be done by high-end executive search firms and consist of an upfront fee being paid out, usually a third of the employee's annual salary. In a delimited/engaged search, an upfront fee is paid to the headhunter but will be refunded if the search fails in providing an employee to the company. Contingent search firms are paid only when the candidate accepts the job and the amount tends to be a percentage of the employee's annual salary.

Recruiters (i.e. internal recruiters) will work in-house for a company. Effectively, this type work as an employee of the company, serving a role that is dependent on their job description and contract. They follow the normal advertisement procedures for a job vacancy - broadcasting the role, for example, on their own company's website, other job advertisement websites, in newspapers and within the local community. Interested candidates will send in their details or request company application forms (as per the advertised vacancy information) and the recruiter has the task of sorting through the applicants to round down a select few to invite for interviews and then eventually make a decision on who to hire. Recruiters will be paid an employee's salary, rather than receiving compensation or commission payments.

When all is considered, the differences between a headhunter and recruiter are mostly in the areas of employment status and job focus. Internal recruiters tend to be more secure in their job positions, as the company is likely to always require their input and value their role in the company. Headhunters are much more dependent on many different clients in order to secure an income; employment firms must be in contact with many clients in order to provide their staff with enough work to warrant the existence as an employment agency. While the work may be similar, the differences between headhunter and recruiter lie in the methods used.

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