Retained Search

The right person. In the right role. Faster.

Retained Search

Hiring is critical for any company. But for a scaling startup it’s the function that is most correlated with speed of execution. If you can’t hire effectively, you can’t scale.

But hiring for senior positions is hard. It takes a lot of your time and attention. The consequences matter. And in many cases you may be hiring for a position you’ve never hired for before or for functional role you know little about.

We help you help you hire the right person in the right role, faster. We’ll work closely with you and your team to understand your business and your objectives, align on who you need, find them, and then help get them on board. So you can get back to growing your business.

Our Process

  • 1. Understand Your Business

    We start by understanding your business deeply: your market, your strategy, your org structure, and more. We also want to understand your growth plans, constraints to growth, and your vision for how your new executive fits in. We’ll talk to you and other relevant members of your organization to get both a broad and deep sense of your organization, its needs, and its potential.

  • 2. Develop a Profile

    We’ll then take that information and develop a summary of the business, the organization, and the target outcomes that the role will be tasked with achieving. From there, we’ll develop a recommended set of experiences, competencies, and traits that we believe the ideal candidate should posses. We’ll work with you to hone that profile and develop both a sourcing strategy and an executive value prop. For positions you haven’t hired for before, we’ll leverage our previous experience and work to help guide the requirements.

  • 3. Source & Screen

    Using a combination of standard and proprietary sources (along with our own personal networks), we’ll source and screen potential candidates. Candidate interactions with us reflect on your organization, so even all initial screening calls are done by one of our partners to ensure both effective screening and an exceptional candidate experience.

  • 4. Conduct Initial Interviews

    For candidates who pass the screening interview, a longer, deeper-dive set of interviews are scheduled. Our goal in these interviews is to ensure the candidate has the appropriate set of experiences, competencies and traits necessary to be successful in achieving the desired outcomes in your organization.

  • 5. Provide Candidate Summaries

    For candidates who pass our interview process, we’ll prepare short, one-page summaries on each candidate, our ratings across key dimensions, and recommendations for executives to have during the interview process. These recommendation include both areas to probe further and approaches to help successfully close the candidate should you like them.

  • 6. Facilitate Process Management

    We’ll work with your team to help ensure interviews, reviews, and post-interview discussions and follow-ups are completed in an timely manner and help ensure an exceptional candidate experience throughout.

  • 7. Conduct Reference Checks

    Though we always recommend you do your own reference checks, we can help supplement your efforts through our own front- and back-channel reference checks.

  • 8. Provide Offer & Closing Support

    We’ll provide upfront and back-channel offer and negotiation support, and lend an extra hand to close candidates who are on the fence.

  • 9. Follow Up Post-Hire

    After your new employee joins, we’ll check in periodically over the first 90 days to see how things are going and ensure we’ve successfully helped your company achieve its objectives.