Executive Recruiters or Head Hunters solicit people for jobs with companies. To this end, they use various resources or tools to find the most suitable candidates. They usually gather data and look through on-line resume sites to find these matches. Headhunters may work for a company receiving a commission.  In addition, a head hunter may be hired directly for a fee. The headhunters main goal is to get you to become a client. They will do almost anything to make this happen; become your friend, listen to your problems or promise to find you a match in your dream job.

Elicitation

Using elicitation for headhunters is one of their best tools. Armed with the knowledge gained from your resume and the specifics about the positions, headhunters use the art of elicitation to gain your trust and find out information about exactly what you really know how to do or what is fluffed up on your resume. For instance, a headhunter looking for SQL database maintenance skills, could pose as a colleague or an employee of a former company. To this end, the headhunter may ask questions about how you would do database recoveries or queries to find specific data in a database.

Information Brokers

Headhunters can also use information brokers to gather personal information about you when they are targeting you about a job opportunity. They may be able to find out that you are going through some financial trouble by looking at your credit report. With this information they could leverage that information while trying to get you into a new position that only they can setup for you.

Valuable Resource

Executive Recruiters can serve a very valuable purpose in helping people locate employment that makes them happy and makes them money. As with any field, as long as the recruiter is using ethical methods, the risk to the person is very minimal.

Some Dangers

To illustrate; one of the dangers is having your information available to the world. Using a simple Google search look at what one can find. In this search we find hundreds of PDF resumes that list names, phone numbers, home addresses and birth dates. Some even list social security numbers. This can make a social engineers job easier if he can locate a resume or CV on you and have all this information with little or no digging.

Find another such risk in Security Education, Awareness, and Training: From Theory to Practice By Carl A. Roper, Joseph J. Grau, Lynn F. Fischer. On page 288 which can be found here, it talks about social engineers using the headhunter as a ploy.