At this moment, the ideal candidate for your open executive role may be hearing about your company for the first time.
Filtering for this candidate is the simple part. Convincing them to leave their current role and possibly uproot their family requires an element of storytelling that only an experienced executive search firm can provide.
Not to mention qualifying 200+ candidates, managing interviews, building a compensation package, and negotiating your offer. Your company wasn’t built to run executive searches at this depth, but PierceGray was. Below, we’ll share how an executive search is much more than searching for candidates.
The Six Phases of an Executive Search
We break our search process from kickoff to hire into a 48-page training deck for every new hire, divided into the following six phases:
- Strategy definition: We start by understanding your business and the role’s needs, then draft a strategy to guide the search to completion. This serves as the north star and foundation for every element of the search that follows.
- Research and outreach: Our research approach includes a mix of both our known candidate networks and bespoke research based on the spec at hand.
- Candidate Qualification: We take our recommendations seriously. We qualify candidates through a minimum of two personal interactions, including an early screen and deep-dive technical interview.
- Client calls: Throughout the search, we’re transparent. 1-2 weeks into the search, we kick off weekly calls to keep you updated on our progress and candidate pipeline.
- Client interviews: We manage the entire interview process, including assisting with candidate travel if you need them onsite.
- Offer and close: For those who reach this stage, we’ll work with you to build and present an offer, including role expectations, benefits, and compensation. We don’t stop when an offer is sent, though. We continue the search until the role is filled.
Finding and qualifying candidates takes up the visible work that you’ll see during an executive search, but there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to turn a candidate pool into an accepted offer.
What PierceGray Brings to the Table Beyond Searching for Candidates
At PierceGray, an executive search isn’t just the search; it’s the entire process from start to finish. As Mayank Parikh, Managing Director of our HR practice, puts it:
“We'll do everything within the executive search pipeline. We will advise you on compensation, marketing and outreach, messaging, and even your team's structure. It’s end-to-end, but with a pure focus on getting the right person in the role for you at your company.”
For PE-backed firms especially, there is little free time to figure out this process yourself. That’s where working with an experienced executive search firm can be helpful. Beyond a list of qualified candidates, here’s what you get with a PierceGray search:
- A senior team that understands your business
- Thorough research and qualification
- Expert storytelling capabilities
- Advising on relocation, compensation, and your offer
- Partnership for post-hire success
A Senior Team That Understands Your Business
A search that lands the type of candidate who will steer your company into its next chapter starts with you – more specifically, your needs, your current team, and where this hire fits into your growth.
Finding that type of candidate requires more than a cursory understanding of your company, which is why we staff each search team with at least three team members:
- An execution lead who runs point on market activities, research, outreach, and the first calls
- A project lead who has end-to-end accountability for the search
- A senior leader responsible for the outcome and owner of the client relationship
When you hire PierceGray to run your executive search, you’re getting experienced senior leadership that leads the search through every stage and shows up prepared for every call.
Thorough Research and Qualification
On some searches, our total candidate pool can reach 350 (and as high as 500 when searches demand that level of depth), and those candidates aren’t exclusively from previous searches. In fact, up to 80% of candidates are net-new and not carried over from past searches.
Whether it’s looking for a “step-up” hire to fit into an open CFO role, or looking for a new CEO in an HVAC business who began their career elsewhere, we like to challenge assumptions when necessary. A candidate’s background matters, but we also evaluate their communication style, hands-on functional experience, and relevance to the role.
As Gus De Camargo, Managing Director on our Technology Practice, says:
“A candidate will spend an hour with a senior associate or an engagement manager, then another 45 minutes to an hour with a managing director, before we include them in a report. A lot goes into that recommendation; it's something we take seriously, and it's something that ultimately reflects massively on us.”
Expert Storytelling Capabilities
A world-famous company based in New York City may not have a hard time convincing someone to leave their current role, but many of our clients have had to coax a candidate across the country, uprooting their life and family.
That takes more than a compelling offer. It requires your story. Gus De Camargo sees storytelling as one of his primary value-adds for clients:
“We are storytellers in this job. That is the most fundamental thing about a search consultant. We tell the story about your company and the opportunity it presents. It takes a lot to get someone who is gainfully employed and wasn’t even thinking about leaving their job that morning to take a step. Storytelling is the most, I think, important thing that we do.”
As hiring trends towards AI and automation, Gus insists that PierceGray’s storytelling capabilities will remain valuable. It takes years of experience to convince someone on the other side of the phone to act.
Advising on Relocation, Compensation, and Your Offer
We encourage conversations about compensation throughout the search. It’s an important piece of the process, and it will factor heavily into whether a candidate chooses to pursue the opportunity.
There’s more to compensation than pay and benefits, though. What is a candidate leaving from? What bonuses or equity will they forgo? We have the tools to do that discovery and guide the conversation through negotiation to an accepted offer.
Julia Dashuta, Managing Director of our Sales and Marketing practice, offers an inside look into just how much she does for candidates as they move through the hiring process with a client:
“We really hand-hold candidates and clients through the interview process. We do all the scheduling for them, we gather feedback, and stay in touch with candidates throughout the interview process. We’ll also gauge whether they are exploring other opportunities or if anything is at risk from a timing or compensation perspective.”
All of the additional intel we gather through the interview process feeds into a compelling offer that you can make to secure your top pick.
A Partner for Post-Hire Success
For PierceGray, an executive search isn’t complete until a new hire is successfully placed and settled within a client’s company. Cheyenne Stone, who spent years as an Engagement Manager at PierceGray, explains:
“We’re involved from kick-off to hire, and even post-hire we do stay in touch with candidates. Until their start date, we make sure they’re all set and not getting cold feet, and we check in with them after their start date as well. We usually check in on their first day with a good luck text, at the end of the first week, and then again in four to six weeks.”
Good luck texts, negotiation, storytelling – why do all the above? This is what it takes to find, qualify, and encourage the right candidate to join your company. And if you ask our Managing Directors, it’s also the part they love most about executive search and the reason they still personally take on new searches.
For PierceGray, an executive search isn’t complete until a new hire is successfully placed and settled within a client’s company. Cheyenne Stone, who spent years as an Engagement Manager at PierceGray, explains:
Finding Your Ideal Candidate is About More Than a Large Database
A good search partner takes time to understand your business, rigorously searches the market, and tells your story to turn passive candidates into active hires.
These skills take years of experience and hundreds of repetitions to hone. It’s why we’re fortunate to have Managing Directors who’ve been with PierceGray for a decade-plus, still leading new searches from start to finish. While the qualities we covered above may make the job more complex, we find they also make the process more worthwhile.
Do you have an open executive role you need to fill? You know our process, but put us to the test. Schedule a call with our team to discuss your role today.
