Does a headhunter really do it without resumes?

Q: I'm a headhunter who tells people that the best resume is NO resume. Yet companies demand resumes all the time. So what's your guess about how I am able to present candidates to my client companies (employers) without the use of resumes?

Nick's reply: Unlike employers, I don't solicit resumes while I'm searching for candidates. It works like this. A client contracts with me to fill a certain position. I go find great people, usually between one and four. I discuss the candidate with the client and we decide whether to proceed with an interview on the basis of information I have gathered and interpreted. If I provide a resume, it's usually after the interview. Clients pay me to select the candidates; why should they waste their time reading resumes?

So if you chose option three, you're right. My clients interview people based on what I tell them. But there's more. There's something I do that clients love: I discuss the client's business with a candidate, then I transcribe the discussion and provide it to the client (with the candidate's permission, of course). That way, the client gets to see what the candidate has to say about issues that are relevant to the client. So option two is correct, too. I give my client a report about the candidate. But -- you guessed it -- there's more.

Option four is correct, too. I base my initial candidate selections primarily on the recommendations of trusted contacts. I call this a pre-emptive reference check. I talk to people who know the individual before I ever talk to the candidate. If the individual passes muster, I provide these references in written form to my client. Later, I might ask for a resume to "fill in the blanks" -- for information I might not have requested in our discussions.

The client trusts my judgment and interviews the candidate on my say-so, and because other individuals who know the candidate have recommended them. That's what the client is paying me for.

The resume is almost an afterthought. Once you get used to this approach, you realize how inaccurate and incomplete even good resumes really are. They're distracting. What matters is trusted opinions.

You might conclude that my method is very different from what you can do yourself to get in the door with an employer. In fact, you can do this like a headhunter. The reason the Ask The Headhunter approach seems daunting to many people is that it requires a lot of work -- all the work I've described above. However, instead of having a headhunter doing the work, you would arrange for an insider -- someone the company trusts -- to introduce you without a resume, and to recommend you. The most powerful recommendation is always a personal one: a trusted source who suggests that an employer should meet you.

You can be your own headhunter, and that's how to pull it off. The challenge is that you first have to gain the trust and respect of people that good employers trust and respect. Start today. That's what a great career is made of.

Copyright 2008. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate

Nick Corcodilos is author of "Ask The Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job" and the host of www.asktheheadhunter.com. He can be reached by e-mail at seattle@asktheheadhunter.com or at North Bridge Group, P.O. Box 600, Lebanon, NJ 08833. Sorry, no personal replies.