How blind recruitment can benefit executive search
Matt D'Cruz
The new face of recruitment?
A couple of months ago, having taken a brief from a new client, we received a slightly unexpected request. They asked us if we would be able to incorporate blind recruitment into our process.
We’ve written about blind recruitment in the past. We’ve also had several clients who have made a diverse shortlist a core part of the brief, and have delivered impressive shortlists that were both gender-balanced and ethnically diverse. The team themselves have all received unconscious bias training. But the question of running a blind search process had us scratching our heads. After all, the process of executive search necessitates knowing who you are approaching before you talk to them.
In the end, we decided to make it a normal search for us, and blind for the client. We would of course be aware of who we were approaching, and we conducted thorough face-to-face first-round interviews as normal. But the client would have no idea who individual candidates were until after they had agreed to interview them.
This posed a few challenges in our weekly update calls: we learned to get used to
gest job site in the US – the largest being Indeed – so the synergies are obvious, especially if the new owner opts to further integrate the two sites. Whether this justifies the gigantic valuation is another question entirely – the barrier to entry for new rivals doesn’t seem especially high to me, leaving the sector very open to further disruption. But Glassdoor, which has 30m members worldwide, is already growing faster than LinkedIn, Indeed and Monster, so what lessons can employers learn from it?
Research from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation suggests 42% of employers have 
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This is such a perennial issue in the headhunting world I’m surprised it’s taken this blog so long to get round to covering it. Before I became a headhunter, I would never have dreamed of asking someone how much they earned – it just isn’t done in polite conversation. Now, I have to do it dozens of times a week. The vast majority of candidates answer without batting an eyelid, but a handful still bristle at the question, or refuse to answer whatsoever. This is understandable, but ultimately misguided.
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At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, Mark Zuckerberg made an interesting comment about what he looks for when making important hires.
In his 2011 AdWeek memoir on David Ogilvy, the advertising legend, Kenneth Roman