Top Headhunters of All Time: Not Who You'd Think

You might think that history's top headhunters are stealthy, upscale professionals who have the contact info of all America's top executives squirreled away in their iPhones, and the knowledge of who can be induced to go where for the right price. Not so, according to jobs expert Jeff Christian, founder of CTPartners.

"The top recruiters are Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and John Chambers [chairman of the board and CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc.]," according to Christian. "Rather than conducting searches for a fee, their model was to gobble up incredible talent. They knew how to scale companies and leverage talent into exponential revenue gain."