A Discreet Search in the Defence Industry

The defence industry used to be a sector people preferred not to talk about, and for good reason it is very discreet. The HR director of one of our clients had moved to a defence company and asked me whether we could help him fill a very important position with the utmost discretion.

I agreed and, after the briefing, took on the search myself. For reasons of confidentiality, I did not want to involve any of my staff.

The big challenge: no one was allowed to find out that the company was filling this position. So not only could we not tell candidates the company’s name, we also had to describe it in a way that made it impossible to guess who the client was. In practice, that is harder than you might think. Often one or two seemingly harmless keywords in a job description are enough for an industry insider to know immediately which company it is.

Projects like this are the supreme discipline of headhunting. The headhunter has to describe the position so that candidates can decide whether they want to enter the application process – without them being able, under any circumstances, to tell which company it is. Incidentally, this confidentiality also works the other way round: when I presented candidate profiles to the HR director, I had to describe them so that he could decide whether to invite a candidate without being able to work out which company that candidate worked for.

This only works if the headhunter has sufficient expertise and wins the trust of both the client and the candidates.

That is why the first interview did not take place at the client’s premises but in our office. When the HR director and the candidate met there, neither knew which company the other worked for. Soon afterwards, both were working for the same one.