When should you hire a headhunter, and how does it work?

Yes. For any employer who hires more than once in a while, SocialFind considers RPO better than a headhunter or a recruitment agency. There are three reasons.

A headhunter earns from your vacancy; RPO works for your recruitment. The agency is paid a fee per placement, usually a percentage of the annual salary, so its interest is a fast placement. An RPO partner works within a fixed agreement, so its interest is recruitment that keeps delivering.

With a headhunter, your costs grow with every hire. With RPO they do not: with a structural hiring need, an RPO model is usually more cost-efficient than paying separate placement fees each time.

With a headhunter, the knowledge stays with the agency. With RPO, you build your own: your employer brand, your reach among professionals and your data on what works. How the two routes compare is set out in RPO versus a recruitment agency.

No cure no pay is not a guarantee; it is an incentive to be fast. The agency only earns when someone signs, so it puts its time into whichever assignment will close quickest. Your vacancy competes with those of its other clients, and a strong candidate may be on the table at several employers at once.

Exclusivity puts the risk on the employer and the certainty with the agency. You hand your vacancy to one firm for weeks, and that firm does not have to deliver a result. If it goes nowhere, you start again and the time is lost.

There is exactly one case in which a headhunter is defensible: one senior role, a handful of people who can do it, and a reason not to search openly. Think of a finance director being replaced while the current one is still in post. How such a search works is covered in finding staff for management and executive roles.

In every other case it does not pay off. Several hires, the same kind of role again and again, or people you can reach with your own story: with a headhunter you pay the full fee each time for something you could build yourself. People who are not looking can also be reached without a headhunter, by letting them get to know your company and your professionals first. That approach is called Thought Leader Recruitment.

If you still choose a headhunter for that one confidential role, protect yourself.

No exclusivity without something in return. Only with a short term, regular progress updates and a way out. Settle in advance what happens if you find a candidate yourself.

A sharp profile. What should this person have achieved a year from now? A vague profile produces candidates who look right on paper and not in the interview.

Know who does the work. Ask who actually carries out the search and how many assignments that person is running at once. What else to look for is covered in choosing a recruitment agency.

What does a headhunter actually do?

A headhunter looks for people who are not looking. They map out who currently does the job elsewhere, approach those people personally and deliver a shortlist of two or three candidates.

The traditional agency leans on the people it already knows. That database used to be its only real asset, and that asset is gone. Today you reach the people you need through online media, LinkedIn, targeted campaigns and direct approaches from your own company. You do not need a middleman with a contact list for that.

Who pays the headhunter?

The employer, and the full fee. In the Netherlands, anyone providing placement services may not ask the jobseeker for anything in return; that rule is in article 3 of the Dutch Placement of Personnel by Intermediaries Act. The candidate pays nothing.

How many headhunters are there in the Netherlands?

A great many: Eurostat counts all employment placement businesses together, from 9,681 in 2021 to 12,905 in 2024. We do not give a list. The question is not which agency, but whether this role needs an agency at all, and usually the answer is no.

What is the difference between a headhunter and a recruitment agency?

A headhunter mainly approaches people who are not looking, usually for one senior role. A recruitment agency more often works from its own database and from adverts. The business model is the same, a fee per placement, which is why SocialFind chooses neither. What the recruitment terms mean is explained in our glossary.

SocialFind is an RPO partner for employers who need people on a structural basis, without a fee per placement, and wrote this article using Eurostat figures and the Dutch statute, checked on 27 October 2026. If you would like articles like this in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.