There is one misunderstanding that costs processes: treating the headhunter as if they were your agent. They are not. Their assignment is signed by a company, that company defines the profile and that company pays the fee. You are not their client: you are the solution they have to present to their client. Understanding this is not cynicism, it is the best news you can get, because it turns an awkward conversation into a negotiation with known rules.
This article is about positioning, not interview technique. And before that call arrives it pays to have your material in order: the free ATS check reviews your CV in a minute, with no account and with nobody at your company finding out. And if you are moving without wanting it known, the guide to a discreet executive job search sets out what to do and in what order.
Editorial note: this text does not reproduce any specific person's conversation and quotes no identifiable consultant. It is the economic logic of executive search explained from the industry's own published professional standards, linked at the end.
The contract you have never seen
Executive search at this level is run, according to the standards of the AESC — the industry's international association — on a retained and exclusive basis: the hiring company and the firm sign a written agreement setting out scope, timing and fees, and the firm commits to acting in that client's best interest. Everything else — including you — happens inside that frame.
Three practical consequences follow. First: the consultant is not paid to place you, they are paid to solve a company's problem. Second: putting you forward carries reputational cost for them; if you fail, the person who looks bad is the one who proposed you. Third: their incentive and yours coincide at exactly one point — that you should be the most defensible solution in front of their client — and nowhere else.
The process seen from their side of the table
Sequence derived from the commitments the AESC publishes for its member firms towards hiring organisations.
What changes in how you present yourself
If their job is to defend you in front of a board, your job is to make that easy. In practice that means three very concrete things.
Give them ammunition, not a biography. What they need is not your full history but two or three proofs that you have already solved the problem their client has now, with scale and with numbers. If your CV still describes duties, start with From duties to results: 8 executive CV lines rewritten.
Answer the objections before they have to. The sector switch, the sabbatical year, the company size, the overqualification: those are the questions their clients will ask, and they would rather carry the answers with them. A candidate who pre-empts the uncomfortable objection is a cheap candidate to defend.
Be predictable. Clear availability, salary expectations reasoned as a range, realistic notice periods. Ambiguity, which feels like prudence to you, reads as risk to them.
On the first call he spent twenty minutes on his own career and none on the client's problem. On a second call, for a different assignment, he reversed the order: he first asked why the role was open and what had failed before, and only then described the two cases of his own that resembled it. He made the shortlist. His experience had not changed; what changed was which part of it he put on the table.
What to ask (and why those questions position you)
The right questions do two things at once: they give you information to decide with, and they portray you as someone already thinking like an executive of that project. The wrong ones — "how many candidates are there?" — portray you as an applicant.
Questions you should be asking
- Is the assignment exclusive and signed, or are you mapping the market?
- At what point in the process will you tell me who the company is?
- Why is the role open: is it new, is it a replacement, what happened before?
- Who really decides, and how many stages are there?
- What three things must this person have achieved within twelve months?
- What is the compensation band for the assignment?
- Who will my candidacy be shared with, and when?
What to keep to yourself
Keeping quiet is not hiding: it is not handing over material that can only be used against you.
- Criticism of your current employer. Even when it is fair. Whoever is listening is projecting how you will speak about them in two years.
- Your employer's confidential data. Margins, contracts, named clients. Showing them does not prove expertise, it proves you do not know where the line is.
- Urgency. If your situation is pressing, manage it through timelines, not by confessing it on the first call.
- The internal politics of your other processes. You can say you are in advanced conversations; you do not need to say with whom.
- "I'd take anything." That is the sentence that removes you from every shortlist at once.
What they do owe you, even though you are not the client
Working for someone else does not mean you should accept any treatment. The AESC itself publishes a candidate bill of rights with concrete commitments you can invoke perfectly naturally.
| They owe the company | They owe you |
|---|---|
| To work exclusively and in writing on that assignment. | To confirm that a real, exclusive assignment exists. |
| To act in the client's best interest with independent judgement. | To explain the role and, in due course, to name the company. |
| Confidentiality over the client's information. | Confidentiality over your interest and your data. |
| To present a broad, unbiased slate. | To answer your queries and give you progress updates on time. |
| To stay involved through onboarding. | To tell you when you are no longer under consideration, and to remove you from their database if you ask. |
That last row is the one almost nobody claims and the one that stings most when it fails. Asking to be told that you are out is not an imposition: it is a public commitment of the industry.
She agreed to send her CV without knowing who the process was for. The firm shared it with a company whose CEO knew her boss. Nothing illegal, but avoidable: it was enough to ask at what point the client is identified and to request that her candidacy not be shared without notice. The same care applies to every confidential search: your name travels faster than the process.
When the call is about a role that does not fit
This is the most wasted moment of all. Saying no and hanging up throws away the relationship. Saying no, explaining in two sentences what you would be looking for and offering two useful names turns a lost call into a position on their market map. Consultants work with long memories and with assignments that repeat every few months.
For that memory to work in your favour there has to be something to find when they search your name: that is prepared in LinkedIn for executives: how to get on headhunters' radar. And if your problem is that you never even reach that call, the explanation is in why nobody calls you even though you fit the role. Once the process moves, continue with how to prepare for an executive interview and with the role templates for General Manager or Operations Director.
A headhunter is not looking for the best executive on the market. They are looking for the one they can defend with the least effort in front of their client. Your job is to be that person.
Sources
- AESC (Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants), Client Bill of Rights: retained and exclusive assignment, written agreement covering scope, timing and fees, and acting in the client's best interest. aesc.org.
- AESC, Candidate Bill of Rights: exclusivity of the assignment, candidate confidentiality, information about the role and the client, progress updates, notification when no longer under consideration and the right to be removed from the database. aesc.org.
- AESC, Standards (code of professional conduct and professional practice standards). aesc.org/standards.
- The two role-based cases are anonymous examples built from situations that recur in executive processes; they do not reproduce statements by any identifiable person.