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category

Search Process

An executive search is a sequence of decisions before it's a placement: how the brief gets written, how long each stage takes, what a retained engagement costs against a contingency one, and what separates a firm's process from a plain keyword search. This category covers those mechanics stage by stage — the how of a search, not the who.

9 posts

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search-process

How Does Executive Search Work?

A plain-language explanation of how executive search works: what makes it different from a job posting, who it's for, and the shape of the process — with the stage-by-stage depth linked separately.

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search-process

What Is Retained Search, and Who Is It For?

Retained search is often used loosely, as a stand-in for executive search generally. It is actually defined by one specific thing: how the firm gets paid across the engagement, and what that lets it afford to do.

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search-process

What a Headhunting Fee Actually Pays For

The percentage is the easiest part of a headhunting fee to compare and the least useful part to compare on. What actually decides the number rarely gets said out loud.

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search-process

Executive Search Methodology: How to Tell Firms Apart

Read four firms' methodology pages and you will read the same page four times. The differences are real — they just do not live where the marketing does.

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search-process

The Executive Search Process, Step by Step

Every stage of an executive search has a failure mode that only shows up two stages later. Here is the sequence, what each step is for, and where each one breaks.

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search-process

Headhunter vs Recruiter: What the Difference Means

The titles are used interchangeably and the work is not the same. The useful distinction is not seniority — it is whether the person you want is currently looking.

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search-process

How to Write an Executive Search Brief That Actually Works

A brief is not a job description with extra detail. It is the rubric every downstream decision gets made against — and vague criteria do not stay vague, they get resolved silently.

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search-process

Retained vs. Contingency Search: What Actually Differs

The fee structure is the visible difference. The consequential one is that payment timing decides how much research a firm can afford to do before it knows it will be paid.

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search-process

What a Retained Executive Search Firm Actually Does

Retained firms describe their work in stages. Clients experience it as long stretches of silence punctuated by a document. Here is what is happening in the silence.

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