Executive Search

Great leaders create great businesses. We’ll help you find them.

Hiring a new leader can either make or break an organization. You don’t get a second shot at picking the best candidate to take your business to the next level. The pressure is real when building your executive team. And unless you have strong in-house executive recruitment capabilities, you likely need a little help.

That’s where we come in. For more than 25 years, our executive search experts have helped top-flight businesses across the United States source, screen, and select the best executive talent in their market. Our tried and tested search methodology ensures that, when it’s time to make an offer, you can be confident that you’re making the right choice.

Northwest Partners has more than 25 years of experience conducting successful executive searches for our clients in FinTech, insurance, healthcare, higher education, and technology.

A successful executive search starts with finding a partner that understands your unique requirements, goals, and ideal candidate persona. We pride ourselves on being that partner. Using a tried and tested executive search process, the team at Northwest Partners will work with you every step of the way to find, screen, and secure your company’s next game-changing leader.

Here’s how we do it.

Our executive search process

Initial client meeting. This is where we outline the search requirements, discuss timelines, and understand your future organizational strategies, missions, and corporate culture.

Deeper client analysis. From there, we conduct a thorough analysis of your company to identify key opportunities for the new executive. This helps define the ideal candidate profile.

Market analysis and candidate specification. Once we have an ideal persona, we analyze the market to create a compelling executive profile. This is conducted by a team of skilled researchers, and results in a candidate specification document with key information about the role, responsibilities, opportunities, and career and educational requirements.

Search strategy. This is where the rubber hits the road. We canvas your market, identifying key companies where ideal candidates might be employed. From there, we create strategies and compile resources to facilitate effective outreach. This might include leveraging our database of candidates, third party search tools, social networks, and personal networks.

Candidate identification. This phase is more commonly known as talent mapping. We create a thorough map of all identified talent that exists within your industry for the target function. This is the longlist of potential candidates. After that, we qualify and pre-screen that list against the ideal candidate persona.

Candidate outreach and qualification. Next on the list is contacting, screening, and qualifying candidates who made it past step five. The goal is to reduce the candidate list to ten at most through detailed interviews that dig deeper into the candidate’s background, competencies, interest, and fit for the job.

Reference checks and shortlist presentation. After a basic, confidential background check to verify the candidates’ qualifications and background, we create a shortlist of candidates to present to you, the client.

Final shortlist analysis. From there, the client and our search team work through the shortlist of candidates and select a final pool of three to five individuals. This is typically facilitated by a more thorough round of reference checks, a series of interviews, and consultations with you about each of the candidates.

Offer and negotiation. At this stage, it’s in your hands to make the decision that feels best for your team. We’ll help guide you in making your decision by reminding you of the steps in the process, and the original goals for the search. We’ll also help with creating a competitive offer and will act as a mediator during negotiations.

Onboarding and integration. Congratulations! You’ve found your new executive to take your company to the next level. If needed, we’ll stick around to help with onboarding and integrating the new team member into your organization.

The executive search experts at Northwest Partners have used this process to quickly and efficiently fill the most in-demand technical roles across a range of industries. Consider us your partner from your first contact with our team, through to when you onboard your new executive candidate.

Have questions about our executive search process, or want to get started?