By Andrew Glover, Nathalie Mathieu & Karen Sidhu | June 2026 |
Ask a surgeon whether to sterilize instruments, a structural engineer whether load-bearing walls matter, or a pilot whether the pre-flight checklist is optional, and you'll get the same answer anywhere in the world. Some fields have practices so foundational that skipping them isn't a style choice — it's a mistake.
Recruiting isn't one of those fields, and we should be honest about that. Ask ten experienced recruiters the right way to structure a search, how to advise a candidate on a counteroffer, when to tell a client their expectations are unrealistic, or how long an executive search should take, and you'll get ten answers — most of which start with the same two words: it depends.
Why Recruiting Lives in a Gray Zone
Recruiting has no governing body, no licensing board, no universally required training, and no standardized code of conduct. There's no bar exam for headhunters, no oath, no mandatory certification. So practice varies wildly — not just between firms, but between two people at the same firm, on the same search, on the same day.
Retained vs. contingency? Depends. How many candidates should be presented? Depends on the role. Does the profile the client wants even exist in this market? Depends on what the mapping turns up.
And most of that variability is legitimate. Recruiting is genuinely context-dependent in ways that other disciplines aren't. The right approach for a seed-stage startup making its first sales hire looks almost nothing like the right approach for a Fortune 500 succession plan. Both are "recruiting." Swap the approaches and both searches suffer.
The Few Things We Hold Ourselves To
We don't claim a definitive playbook for every search, or a perfect script for challenging a hiring manager. These aren't industry commandments, and we're not suggesting anyone who works differently is doing it wrong. They're simply the standards we've chosen for ourselves — the ones we don't let "it depends" touch.
1. We respond to people. Everyone who engages with us in a search has a career, aspirations, and often a family depending on it. They deserve to know where they stand, even when the answer isn't the one they wanted. We know this gets genuinely hard at volume; limited coordinators, imperfect systems, more applicants than hours. We don't think people who struggle with it don't care; we think it's worth building the systems and habits that make a response the default rather than the exception.
2. We tell the truth, even when it's unwelcome. If the compensation isn't competitive, if the requirements shrink the talent pool to almost nothing, or if we surface a real concern about a finalist, we'll say so. Not because clients are wrong to have strong views — they usually know their business far better than we do — but because our value is in giving them the full picture so they can make the call. Trust is built through candor, not agreement, and we'll trade a short-term win for a long-term partnership every time.
3. There's no such thing as a perfect candidate. People are imperfect, so a flawless one was never on offer. This isn't an argument for settling or for lowering the bar — the bar matters, and we hold it. It's an argument against the kind of box-ticking perfectionism that screens out the stretch hire who becomes your best performer, or fixates on the unicorn while strong, real candidates walk. Define what actually must be true for the role, and weigh the rest honestly.
4. Hiring is a team sport. The best searches happen when recruiter and hiring manager work as partners with shared accountability — honest feedback in both directions and a willingness to question assumptions on either side. The recruiter brings market insight and pattern recognition; the hiring manager brings business context and vision. Neither gets a great outcome alone.
5. We protect the people who trust us with information. Confidentiality and fairness aren't optional extras. Candidates share sensitive details about their lives and careers; clients share sensitive details about their businesses. We treat both with care, and we work to give every candidate a fair shot rather than a biased one.
So What Are We Actually Arguing?
Not that recruiting needs a rulebook or a regulator, the complexity and the context-dependence are real, and we'd be the first to defend "it depends" as the right answer to most questions in this work.
But the absence of formal standards doesn't have to mean an absence of standards. It depends is a fair answer to a great deal in recruiting. It isn't a fair answer to whether you treat people with respect, tell the truth, protect what's confidential, or own your work. Those are the lines we've drawn for ourselves.
What do you think? If you were drawing your own lines, what would you refuse to let "it depends" touch?
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