“Never Heard of You” | How to Evaluate a Search Firm
- Blog
Good. That is the right place to start. There are more search firms operating today than at any point in the history of this business, and the largest names in the category earned their recognition over decades of volume, offices, and headcount. That is real. What it measures is the size of the firm, not the way your particular search gets run. What follows is a filter aimed at the second thing, plus three questions worth asking any firm you are considering. Ours included.
Every number below is a firm-wide figure drawn from completed engagements. Ask us to open the file on any of them.
“Never heard of you” is a fair thing to say
You said it on a phone call last month and you were right to say it. Someone you have never met is asking you to commit real money to a seat that matters. Skepticism is the correct posture, and I would think less of a buyer who skipped it.
Here is what I am not going to do about it. No client list. No paragraph about our culture. No line about how much we care. Those answers are built for people who are not paying attention, and you are paying attention, which is why you raised the objection in the first place.
The honest answer is that you have never heard of us, and that recognition is a weak basis for this decision in either direction. Let me lay out what I think it does and does not tell you, then hand you something more useful than my opinion.
The names you know earned those names. That is not the question.
Be straight about how recognition gets built in this business, because most of it is earned. The large firms you can name spent decades assembling offices across continents, thousands of recruiters, enormous placement volume, and long standing relationships with enterprise procurement. Nobody hands that out. It says something real about durability, and in some cases about depth.
Here is the part that bears on your decision. Scale is a firm-level fact and your search is a desk-level event. The name on the letterhead does not tell you how much of the market gets mapped, who is actually running the work, how many of those people get contacted, or what you will be able to see while it happens. Two searches inside the same respected firm can run very differently depending on whose desk they land on.
The rest of the field is harder to sort. Barrier to entry is a laptop and a database seat, every cycle produces another wave of firms, and almost nobody exits. Some of them are very good. From the outside you have no reliable way to tell, and defaulting to the biggest name in the room does not solve that problem so much as change the subject.
The industry has gotten louder. It has not gotten better.
Everybody says the same three things
Proposals in this category converge. Strip the logos off three of them and the same three promises tend to surface, and none of the three can be tested before you sign.
“Quality candidates”
Nobody pitches the opposite. On its own the word carries no information, and there is no way to test it before you hire.
“A faster process”
Faster than what, measured from when, to which milestone. Speed claims almost never name a baseline, which is what makes them safe to say and useless to hear.
“True partnership”
This one describes a relationship rather than a deliverable. Worth asking what specifically changes on a Tuesday morning because you are a partner instead of a customer.
A promise you cannot check is not a differentiator. If the firms in front of you sound interchangeable, that is not a failure of your attention. It is a shortage of anything checkable in the pitch.
Three things we do that you can verify while we do them
Each of these is a claim, a mechanism, and a receipt. If any one of them is missing, you are back in the land of adjectives.
We find everyone who could do the job, not just the ones looking
The claim. The person best suited to this seat may not be on the market at all. Someone doing that exact job right now, doing it well, with no updated resume and no reason to read a job post, is the profile most likely to fit and least likely to be contacted. Job posts, database pulls, and inbound applications all reach the same visible sliver of the market, which is why a longer vendor list does not produce more talent. It is the same shallow pool, fished by more boats.
The mechanism. Before a single message goes out, we build the map: every company in the geography that employs the skill, every person in the seat or one rung below, tiered and sequenced. Outreach runs against the full addressable market, not against whoever is convenient to reach that week.
The receipt. You do not have to believe the average. You get your own number, on your own search, in writing: how many people can do this job in your market, how many we reached, how many answered, and who said no and why.
Everyone you meet is measured against your bar, not ours
The claim. A candidate who impresses a recruiter is not the same thing as a candidate who clears your standard. When the benchmark is not written down early, it tends to get built backward from whoever turned up, and the summary gets written to match.
The mechanism. The benchmark is built at intake, after signature and before contact, with the people who will actually work with the hire. Every finalist runs through four independent evaluation layers, including technical validation by our in-house CTO. Nobody reaches your calendar who is not qualified against that benchmark, interested in the specific opportunity, and in a position to move. Behavioral assessment is available when a client wants it, scoped and priced separately.
The receipt. We do not pitch candidates. We build cases. You get the evidence behind every person you meet, including the ones we argued about internally, and you are free to disagree with our read.
You watch the search happen while it is happening
The claim. This is the part that does the most work against “never heard of you,” because it reduces how much you have to take on faith. Traditional recruiting asks you to wait quietly and receive an outcome. The stretch between kickoff and the first candidate is where a search goes wrong quietly.
The mechanism. Every committed search runs through a client portal with six uniform sections, live from day one: the map, the pipeline, every candidate record and status, the intelligence products, and the current state of the work. A weekly steering call runs alongside it. You see the whole market we built, not the three names we chose to show you, and you see it while the search is still moving rather than after it is over.
The receipt. Ask for a demo before you commit to anything. Not a deck about the portal. The portal.
The visible slice against the full market
Reach the people who are already reachable
Post, pull the database, message whoever answers. The pool is capped at the people who raised a hand, and the outcome is capped with it. Industry data from AESC and SHRM puts contingent pool reach at 15 to 20 percent of an addressable market, with contingent fill rates in the same 15 to 20 percent band.
Map the market first, then work all of it
The full addressable pool is built before outreach begins, and the search runs against the whole thing. The people who would not answer a job post are a large share of any market, and they are the reason the map exists. What you get is not a handful of names handed down. It is a documented account of an entire market and what it said back, and you are the one who decides which of those people make your short list.
The line we run the firm on
Everybody promises the right hire. We prove it before you make one.
Traditional recruiting is a leap of faith. We are a paper trail. That is not a slogan about our attitude, it is a description of what arrives in your portal on a Tuesday afternoon in week two.
Most firms cannot do this, and it is not because they are lazy
Somebody working contingent is paid only if their candidate is the one who gets hired, and nothing is payable at commencement. That single fact determines everything downstream. A recruiter carrying several searches on spec cannot afford to spend three weeks mapping one market, because most of those assignments will never produce a fee and the map is a sunk cost in every one of them.
So the rational move is speed to the visible slice. Post it, pull the list, send the template, submit whoever answers, move to the next req on the whiteboard. That is not a character flaw. It is arithmetic, and the people running it are often very good at the job the model actually pays them to do.
Watch for the word submitted when you read a proposal. A firm that measures its work in submittals is telling you the deliverable is a stack of resumes, and that the search ends when the stack is handed over. Nobody is accountable for the seat.
The enemy here is the model, not the recruiter. A structure that cannot pay anyone to map a market is unlikely to produce one, no matter how hard the individual works.
Two different measures, and we report both
We complete 100 percent of every committed search. That qualifier is not a hedge. It is the claim.
Committed means signed, scoped, benchmarked, and funded through a milestone structure, with a defined search and a client who shows up to the steering call. It also means the assignment has to be realistic before anyone signs. Nobody can create a person who does not exist, and nobody can make a qualified candidate want a job they do not want. Where the seat is real and the market can support it, we commit to the work, and it gets finished.
Completion and retention are two separate measures and we publish both, because a firm can finish a search and still put the wrong person in the seat. Every committed search has closed. Separately, 95 percent of placed candidates remain in the position we placed them in.
That second number is the one worth sitting with. Research from the U.S. Department of Labor, SHRM, and Leadership IQ puts the cost of a bad hire at 30 to 200 percent of salary and finds that 46 percent of new hires fail within 18 months. Roughly one in two. That is the base rate a hiring decision is made against, and it is the reason we treat completion and retention as separate reporting lines rather than folding both into a success rate. A success rate names neither measure, so it defends neither.
Three questions worth asking any firm you are considering
Ask these of every firm you are considering, including this one, including the firm you already use. You are not grading the answer on how good it sounds. You are grading it on how specific it is, and on whether the thing being described is something you will eventually be able to look at.
How many people in my market can do this job, and how many of them will you contact?
Nobody has that number on day one, so a firm that produces one on the spot is usually estimating. It gets built after intake, through research and sourcing, and it should exist on paper before the first candidate is contacted. What you are testing is whether the firm intends to build it at all, and when you will get to see it.
A weak answerAn immediate number. Market size is not knowable on day one, so a figure produced in the meeting came from a database seat count or from nowhere. The right answer is a date, not a number: when the count gets built, and when you see it.
What is my hire being measured against, and who sets that standard?
Your leadership sets it. The people this hire reports to own the outcome and know what has to be true to work alongside the team in place. We structure it, pressure test it, and put it in writing before anyone is contacted. Then we name what is adjustable: comp band, geography, industry adjacency, years in seat. Some of that is load bearing, some is preference. Settle it at intake and a mid-search adjustment reads as evidence, not a moving goalpost.
A weak answerA standard that shows up after the candidates do. That one was likely built backward from whoever turned up.
What will I see in week two, and week three, and week four?
A real search takes weeks. Mapping a market, reaching people who are not looking, and getting honest answers out of them cannot be compressed, and a search that produces candidates in days has probably skipped the part that makes the rest trustworthy. So the useful question is not how fast. It is what arrives, and when. Ask for it week by week, and ask what the market itself looks like at each of those points: who was approached, who responded, who passed and the reason they gave.
A weak answerCandidates as soon as possible. That is a description of effort, not a schedule anyone can be held to.
Why not come ask us first
You are going to run this search with somebody. Whichever direction you go, the three questions above will tell you more in ten minutes than a capabilities deck tells you in an hour, and they cost nothing to ask.
Ask them of the firm you already use. Ask them of the names you recognize. Then ask us, and compare how specific the answers come back. That comparison is the recommendation. You do not have to take my word for anything, because every claim above is either visible in the portal while the search is running or it is not true, and you would know which inside the first two weeks rather than at the end of a quarter.
If you are early and only want to think the seat through out loud, that works too. A first conversation carries no agenda and no obligation. If the search does not call for a retained firm, we will tell you that.
Start with the conversation
The fastest way past “never heard of you” is a direct conversation and a live look at a search in progress. Pick whichever fits where you are.
