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By the end of November, more chief executives had lost their jobs or left them this year than during all of 2007, when 1,356 exited, according to the outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

That churn is very good for job recruiting firms, more popularly known as headhunters. Revenue for search firms worldwide was expected to grow by 8.7% in 2008 to $11.6 billion, according to the Association of Executive Search Consultants.

When it comes to finding chief executive officers, are headhunters worth all that money? The going rate to recruit a chief executive is typically a flat $1 million, which is about one-third of that CEO's first-year cash compensation. Do corporations get bang for those bucks in their stock price? Or do they do better when they perform the search themselves?

We measured the stock performance of 117 large companies that hired a chief executive during the past 10 years from outside their organization with the help of one the big four recruiters--Heidrick & Struggles, Korn/Ferry International, Russell Reynolds Associates and Spencer Stuart. We weighed them against the performance of 23 companies that did their own searches.

The upshot: Companies that hired a chief executive on their own fared better than companies that used headhunters. Corporate boards that trusted their own guts saw their company's stock realize a return 34% higher than the S&P 500 one year after their chief executive's date of hire (see table below). Only Korn/Ferry's searches matched that success over the same period. (We also measured other time periods, to prevent the data from being skewed by anomalies in company or stock market performance, or by news of a chief's departure.)