Headhunting with heart and brain

Founder and CEO of Esbees Headhunting Søren Bøge Sørensen had a decade of recruiting experience in global headhunting when he founded Esbees in 2010; only a few years later to get his first customer from the defense industry:   

- I accidently met and talked to the HR Director of Airbus and came to realize that they had almost two thousand open positions in the company. That’s what a recruitment guy like me calls a business opportunity and before long I got my first assignment from the European aerospace giant, Mr. Sørensen says.   

Airbus was setting up a major border control and homeland security operation for the Saudi Arabian government and was looking for someone to chair the training of the border guard. That someone was found by Søren Bøge Sørensen and paved the way for many more orders on the Arab Peninsula.     

User experiences are important

The civilian part of Esbees businesses has always been the biggest but defense customers also came onboard in Denmark and just like the Airbus case it was by coincidence, according to Mr. Sørensen:   

- Some years ago, I received a message on my voice mail. It was obviously not intended for me but something in the message indicated some opportunities so I called back and before long we had a business meeting that led to Esbees’ first Danish defense customer.   

Several other defense customers have followed and according to the CEO and founder there is a reason for that. A core competence of the company is to translate military skills into capabilities useful for private enterprises:   

- In that process there is no doubt in my mind that bringing soldiers with “user experiences” so to speak together with defense companies is a very fruitful step on the way.   

Involved in the entire process

In 2013 Relations Manager - Associated Partner and Headhunter - Kirsten Paulsen came onboard. She arrived with many years of sales experience from various companies with an ambition of expanding Esbees. The ambition has been fulfilled and according to Mrs. Paulsen it is a combination of hard work and unique services:   

- Just about anyone can read a résumé and create large databases of candidates but that is not the way we do business. Esbees is a very small company and our competition is mostly international recruitment giants hence we simply have to offer something different, better.   

Among those added services is an extreme focus upon human factors, the difficult part of recruitment according to the Associated Partner. Esbees strives to match not only skills and tasks but also people:   

- Some of our customers are small companies too and in such cases it is even more important to find the right match in first try since the room for errors are smaller. One of the ways we are doing that is to be a part of the recruitment process from the very beginning to the very end, according to Mrs. Paulsen.   

Another way of finding the right people in first try is never to advertise for open positions. Esbees relies entirely on their extensive network when identifying potential candidates.   

No digital trends

In the years to come Esbees is going to focus more on public customers among them Danish Defense Acquisition and Logistics Organization and homeland security authorities. One focus that will never change though is the importance of human relations a skill and process that according to the CEO can never be digitalized or automated:   

- Sometimes candidates that did not get the job calls us and thanks us for the recruitment process because it has been of great value to them anyway. That tells me that we are doing things right here at Esbees, Mr. Sørensen finishes.