But let's say you have a vacancy at a salary below £100,000 for a Sales Director of a small division of a major group. This will be an important project for the small search firm and the client can expect that it will be given the highest priority.

The big search firm may well feel that this level of position does not warrant the attention of a senior consultant and will pass it to someone more junior or even recommend that their associate advertising division handles it. This can be particularly galling to the client as the vacancy is critical to the success of the company. In some cases, the priorities of the client are not always matched by the priorities of the large search firm.

Do the best people always appear on your shortlist?
The problem for big search firms is that because they are big they attract a large volume of work. At any one time one of the larger executive search firms may have several projects ongoing in the