What do search firms want? The short answer: to increase the bottom line. The long answer: To provide their customers with the best quality talent that makes the client happy and leads to more business.

Now a staffing firm, UK-based Trinity Scott, helps executive search firms or headhunters do just that. It finds researchers who are then hired by these firms. The researchers’ job is to identify the best candidates that these headhunters can present to their clients.

Has this been done before? Not according to Martin Gooden, Trinity Scott’s founder and director. “There have been various search-to-search and recruitment-to-recruitment firms catering for researchers to varying degrees. The complaint we hear most often is that they are very transactional focused, simply wanting to place the researcher in a new role, whatever the role. This is understandable given that these are usually recruitment companies specializing in consultants more than researchers, and the focus is often on the fee rather than the candidate themselves.”

In order to distinguish Trinity Scott’s approach, Gooden zooms in on the researchers’ career first, the job second. To this end, he has assembled an advisory panel of experienced researchers with more than 80 years of experience among them.

“Our business is about offering careers advice to executive search researchers, helping them with what’s best for them. Consequently, we become a trusted careers advisory partner, hopefully for life, offering careers advice first and employment options second. We help individuals maximize their career potential, whether that’s with their current employer or with a new one.”

Trinity Scott does not charge researchers for its career advice, nor does it plan to do so. When search firms and corporations hire its researchers, the company charges a fee much in the same way a search firm does. The fee is a percentage of the [researcher’s] first year’s salary.

Trinity Scott provides more than 1,800 candidates both in the US and Europe, information about opportunities and careers advice via a weekly newsletter. It also facilitates peer-to-peer mentoring, a membership service offering industry insights and exclusive networking events to keep this niche talent pool engaged.

This approach seems to be working. Just within the past 10 months, the company has placed more than 30 researchers at search firms and other corporations both in the UK and across the United States.

The Buzz

A new niche has been identified and formed. For the first time, there is a staffing firm focusing on finding researchers that help global top-tier search firms as well as boutique specialists within all sectors. The industry now has access to people it would not necessarily have been able to identify — people who help fight the war for talent.