How do you become a headhunter? And what do you need for the job?

Dusseldorf Sabine Hansen was a successful international marketing manager, had connections to the later Google CEO Eric Schmidt and was responsible for a large developer conference. She regularly got calls from headhunters who wanted to poach her. She once said on the phone, “It all sounds very interesting, but I’m more interested in what you do.”

That was a good 20 years ago. Since then, Hansen has been looking for top managers for her clients himself and is one of around 15,000 HR consultants in Germany. They propose candidates for management positions or other vacancies to companies. According to the Federal Association of German Management Consultancies (BDU), headhunters were responsible for filling 76,000 positions in 2021.

Hansen is a classic career changer. This is common in the industry. Headhunter is not an official job title, there is no training. Rather, interested parties have to work towards this job for years. Successful consultants explain how it works, what knowledge they should bring with them and which characters make it to the top.