The Dirty Little Secret Seduction Society

Behind the discreet facades of some of the most fashionable addresses in London, a game of seduction is being played. This is the infidelity of the boardroom, not the bedroom. The offices dotted among the fine-art dealers and designer-label boutiques of Mayfair are home to City headhunters. They prefer to be called executive-search consultants and their practice is one of Britain’s fastest-growing and most lavishly rewarded businesses.

Star flesh-peddlers earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a year by placing executives on company boards or into key roles in banks and public bodies. The cocktail of money and power has lured several politically well-connected people into the business, including Baroness (Virginia) Bottomley, a partner at Odgers, Ray & Berndtson; Ffion Hague, wife of William Hague and now with Hanson Green; and Carolyn Eadie, spouse of Michael Portillo, who works at Spencer Stuart.

The doyenne of the executive recruitment business is Anna Mann, who was asked by BP to advise on candidates to succeed chief executive Lord Browne when he leaves the oil company at the end of 2008. Mann, who had previously found bigwigs for such prominent firms as Marks & Spencer and BT, was engaged to identify external candidates who would be measured against BP’s existing executives. She was once believed to number among her clients 60 of the FTSE 100 companies.

The expansion of the headhunting business is no flash-in-the-pan. It has happened steadily over 25 years and particularly the past 10. Though executive-search revenues sank in the 2001-3 downturn, they have grown by an estimated 20% a year, taking them to double their 1996 levels.

Search firms make money by charging clients 25% to 33% of the first-year salary of the person recruited — so someone hired on a salary of £100,000 might generate a fee of £30,000, and a chief executive hired on a salary of £500,000 might produce a fee of £150,000. In many firms, the individual consultant responsible for each placing will earn a large bonus of up to one-third of the fee.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209-2330100,00.html