Hiring Head Start: Winning the Race for Leadership Talent in 2025
By Adam Boone, Matt Sommi
Imagine standing on the finish line when the starter gun goes off.
That’s the outcome our clients will experience as they get a jump on 2025 leadership hiring now.
With about a third of calendar year 2024 remaining, it might seem premature to start hiring for 2025 now.
But in fact, the timing is perfect if you are looking to position your private equity backed company for success.
A senior leader who starts work in the first week of January can deliver at least two additional quarters of value creation execution in 2025, compared to a leader hired via a search starting then.
In other words, if you wait to start your search until the January 1 budget kicks in, you are six months behind.
Talent Market Dynamics
The key is understanding that leadership talent is a market like any other. Companies are the “buyers” aiming to land the best talent. Those executives are the “sellers” who put their services up for sale.
If your intent as a buyer is to generate outsized returns for investors, then you need to secure the best talent and do so ideally at the lowest cost.
Simple supply and demand principles dictate that the best time to achieve that is when demand is lowest.
That’s why we advise our clients to start their hiring process now for key leaders they plan to bring on board in 2025. If you wait until the 2025 budget kicks in, you will be competing against every other firm looking for that talent.
Besides landing the best talent at the best price, you stand to gain a major boost in value creation that can shorten hold periods and maximize returns.
That’s through the metric we track as “Days to Value Creation.”
Cutting your Days to Value Creation
Our “Days to Close” in executive search is typically half the industry average. There are many reasons for this market leading performance:
Our exclusive focus on software and SaaS and our specialization in private equity mean we have the best network and best perspective on talent.
We cap our recruiter searches to provide the most intensive focus on your search.
We never “quiet quit” like firms who are looking for a fast transactional win. When these firms fail to solve your search quickly, they will appear to maintain the same level of activity, collect the retainer payments, and then eventually admit they cannot recruit the right executive.
Our data-driven process is built to optimize search efficiency, accelerating search steps while consistently producing better results.
Why does all this matter?
Because the metric that matters most for our private equity clients is Days to Value Creation.
Executing on value creation plans is essential to achieving the investment thesis. So time is of the essence when recruiting the executives who lead that effort.
Consider the typical timeline for finding and onboarding a new senior executive:
Click/tap the timeline to view fullscreen.
This all means that over a year has passed from the moment an executive hire is needed to when the execution on value creation plans truly begins.
So in effect, if you don’t start the search until January 1 of 2025, your chosen executive will not be generating value at pace until 2026.
Achieving Industry-Leading Days to Value Creation
Working with Bespoke Partners provides two benefits for achieving the most efficient Days to Value Creation:
Our market-leading search Days to Close is half the industry average and can cut a third of the overall Days to Value Creation.
Our network and relationships with the industry’s best talent enable us to understand who is soon to be on the market so you can connect and secure them before others do. We also have the best visibility into high potential step-up candidates who are ready for the top role.
Faster searches with better outcomes are the hallmarks of the Bespoke process.
The result is a Days to Value Creation that puts you ahead of the pack.
If your team is contemplating a hire, please get in touch. We are happy to provide compensation data by function and scale, give you visibility of actionable executives in our network, and offer perspective on market trends for specific roles.
Bespoke Partners Named in Top 10 of the “Top 49 Retained Executive Search” 2-Years Running by C-Suite CV Secure.
Author:
Adam Boone
Chief Marketing Officer
Boone has led marketing, demand generation, branding, product management, services marketing, or alliances marketing programs for numerous successful companies including Avaya-acquisition Sipera, Sequoia start-up Syndesis, Subex, CoManage, and others. He has driven joint marketing programs and go-to-market initiatives with iconic industry leaders including Microsoft, IBM, GE, AT&T, Oracle, Comcast, Cisco, Ciena and Samsung.
Boone holds an MBA in Business Strategy from the WP Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and completed the Competitive Marketing Strategy Program at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
In his personal time, Boone enjoys travel, fine food and wine, mountain biking, playing and listening to music, and movies.
Author:
Matt Sommi
Senior Vice President
Based in Philadelphia, Matt helps lead Bespoke’s client engagement efforts across the firm’s suite of services.
Prior to joining Bespoke, Matt spent 8 years in research and business development at GLG, supporting private equity due diligence efforts and building relationships with GLG’s middle market private equity firms.