Inside the executive search process: What happens before a candidate ever reaches you
Most people picture a database. A firm gets the call, pulls up a list, sends over a stack of resumes, and waits to see what sticks. Which, honestly, is one way to do it. It is just not the way that tends to find the person you really want.
The first calls that we make on a new search are not to a candidate. It is to someone who has a perfectly good job, is not thinking about leaving it, and will almost certainly pick up the phone and tell me exactly that. Politely, usually. That call, the one that starts with no, is where the search begins.
Most retained searches are won or lost long before a name ever reaches the client. Understanding the executive search process means understanding what happens in that window.
Before the search starts, there’s a conversation worth having
The first thing we do after an agreement is signed is not go looking for candidates. We sit down with the client, the whole team, and we ask a lot of questions.
We call it a launch meeting, and it is where the search actually takes shape. We want to see the org chart, understand who this person reports to, who reports to them, and where the role sits inside the larger organization. If it is a replacement search, we want to know whether the client is looking to fill the hole exactly as it was, or whether there is something the last person was missing that now is the time to fix it.
That second question matters more than most clients expect. A seat that has been open for a few months has a way of revealing itself. You start to see what went wrong, what was never quite right, and what the organization needs now versus what it needed three years ago. We want that conversation on the front end, before we go looking for anyone.
We also ask something that tends to catch people off guard: why would someone want to work here? Tell me what is exciting about this company. Tell me about the culture, the trajectory, and what you do to build the team. It sounds simple, but it goes a long way. When we are on the phone with a candidate who has a perfectly good job and no particular reason to leave it, we need something honest and specific to say about why this seat is worth a serious look. That answer has to come from the client first.
The launch meeting is the foundation the rest of the search is built on, and getting it right is most of the job.
The long list nobody sees
Once the launch meeting is done, we go to work on something the client will never see in its entirety: the long list.
This is where we map the market. We are looking at the competitive landscape, the adjacent industries, the firms where someone with the right combination of experience is likely sitting. We build that list by name. In a search, we might identify people worth a serious look, and the vast majority of them have no idea we are about to call.
That is the point. The long list is a judgment call made by people who know the category well enough to recognize the right profile when they see it, even when that profile does not come with an obvious title or a tidy resume. Sometimes the person we are looking for has done both halves of the job in two separate roles, and nobody has put them together yet. We do that work before the first call goes out.
It takes about two weeks to build real traction from the launch meeting. Two weeks of outreach, conversations, and early interviews before anything worth presenting starts to take shape. That window is how long it takes to reach people who were not expecting to hear from us and give them a reason to keep talking.
Most of those people are employed, settled, and not thinking about leaving. The outreach is direct, usually a brief LinkedIn message from a name the industry recognizes, and the response rate speaks for itself. In a category this narrow and this relationship-driven, that response doesn’t happen by accident. It’s fifty years of knowing who to call and how to have that first conversation. What happens after someone agrees to talk is where the real work begins.
What we know before you meet anyone
By the time a name reaches a client, it has already been through a lot.
We interview every candidate ourselves, usually two or three times before we present them to anyone. The first conversation tells us whether someone is worth a deeper look. The second one is where we start to find the edges, the things they were a little vague on, the pieces of their experience that need more pressure before we can stand behind them. Sometimes a third conversation is what it takes to get there.
What we are listening for goes beyond the resume. A non-compete nobody thought to ask about, maybe a spouse whose career cannot relocate, a compensation expectation that was never going to clear. These are the things that blow up a search at the offer stage, when everyone’s time is already spent. We go looking for them early, on purpose, so they are questions we can work through rather than surprises that end the process.
The sorting, the vetting, the hard conversations, all of that stays on our side of the table so your time goes toward the decision. That is what it means to have a partner on a search rather than a vendor running one.
Getting to yes, and making it stick
Once you have met the candidates and the field narrows, we stay in it.
We work with you on the offer, the compensation structure, and the language of the agreement. We are on the phone with the candidate through that process too, making sure nothing falls apart over something that could have been handled with a conversation. A search that ends at the offer and hands off there is a search that leaves the hardest part to chance.
The candidates we present have been interviewed multiple times, prepped for their meetings, and are genuinely excited about the role by the time an offer is on the table. We spend weeks having honest conversations with them about what this move means for their career, what they would be giving up, and whether this is the right seat at the right time. When they say yes, they mean it.
Historically, the right candidate comes out of the first or second round. That is not a guarantee, but it is what fifty years of running this process looks like in practice. We calibrate after every round, go back to the market where we need to, and keep going until the search is successful.
A retained search is not a faster way to find resumes. It is a different process entirely, built for the hires that are too important to leave to a posting and a prayer. The launch meeting, the long list, the vetting, the conversations that happen before you ever meet anyone: all of it exists so that when the right person walks in, you already know they are right.
If you are weighing a senior hire in publishing or ed tech and want to talk through what the process would look like for your search, we are happy to have that conversation.
Jim Conley, BDES