The Higher You Hire: New Research to Help You Elevate Executive Recruiting

Findings from a long-running annual benchmark survey of corporate executive and leadership recruiting functions show a function moving further upmarket, closing searches faster, and relying more heavily on in-house teams rather than retained search firms. Respondents skew toward large, sophisticated organizations, many with revenues above five billion dollars, and the roles they fill are overwhelmingly senior: nearly all pay above two hundred thousand dollars, with a sizable share above six hundred thousand, and most respondents recruit within the top two percent of their organization's leadership.

Key patterns from the data include:

• Diversity has become the top stated priority for recruiting leaders, replacing "building a function" as the dominant concern from years past, even as some tracking tactics like mandatory diverse slates have declined.
• Direct sourcing has grown steadily, especially for non-headquarters hiring, while retained search firm use in those same roles has fallen over the same five-year period.
• Search firm selection criteria rarely hinge on fee; buyers say relevant experience and capacity matter more than cost.
• Time to fill has dropped across both search-firm and in-house hiring, a shift tied to the move toward virtual interviewing, though onboarding remains a harder problem to solve remotely.
• Search firm spend has fallen year over year among organizations tracked in both periods, even as the largest public search firms report record revenue, a gap attributed to diversification into other service lines.
• In-house executive recruiting teams have grown from about seventy percent to over eighty percent of organizations, with half planning further growth and none planning cuts.
• Recruiter workload, measured as concurrent open searches, has trended down over a decade, giving individual recruiters more room per search.
• A growing share of internal recruiting functions charge back their services to internal clients much like an outside search firm would, and more are feeding external talent mapping directly into succession planning.
• Involvement in board and non-executive director hiring is rising, marking one of the more strategic expansions of the in-house function's remit.

Together the numbers describe a function taking on more senior, higher-stakes work with fewer outside vendors, faster cycle times, and a widening set of responsibilities that now reach into the boardroom.