CEO hunters share 7m-euro market per year

The so-called headhunters, firms that “hunt” CEOs for companies, annually place around 200 executives who earn more than 100,000 euros a year.
Local companies ‘steal’ annually at least 200 top executives from competition, even though the turnovers of the biggest headhunters have fallen by 30 to 40% against 2008. The 200, the majority of whom are Romanians, are the best-paid employees in Romania.
“I don’t think the local executive search market exceeds 6-7 million euros and every newcomer will have a very tough time. If big foreign firms enter the market, they will have to rely almost exclusively on the business coming from the network, from abroad, with chances being very small for them to make a significant turnover exclusively with clients from Romania,” said George Butunoiu, one of the best-known headhunters, who runs a 430,000-euro business. However, the Germans at Kienbaum, with over 100 million euros in turnover in 2009, have recently opened an office in Bucharest. Basically, an executive search firm primarily means having a list of at least 10,000 people and their phone numbers in order to contact them with prospective offers.
The headhunters’ figures are also confirmed by a ZF analysis based on information in the third edition of the ‘Who’s Who in Business Romania 2010 – The leading 1,000 people in business’ yearbook, which reveals that at least 140 executives were new entries in the yearbook in 2010.