Category: Executive Recruiting Firm

by Ross Fletcher

‘Why don’t you meet my buddy who’s an executive recruiter – I think you’d get on really well.’  And just like that, over a Starbucks with a good friend, a great idea was born.

After more than 25 fulfilling years in broadcasting, I was ready for a new challenge.  With that one suggestion, my next career move had just slipped into view.

The next coffee was a little stronger, and at higher altitude.  The pourer was Kevin Hartz, as we settled into the Herd Freed Hartz conference room on the 71^st floor of Seattle’s iconic Columbia Tower.  As a managing partner of the firm, Kevin regaled me with stories of how he and his colleagues had got into the business of Executive Search.  I listened intently, soaking up the ways in which this industry-leading team had come to their profession. The more Kevin talked, the more intrigued I became about his world and the parallels to mine; storytelling, research, interviewing. We parted with the intention of regrouping in a couple of weeks’ time and although just a casual conversation, my mind kept whirring. Things flourished from there as I started meeting the rest of the team, learning their culture and how impressively they lived their company values.

I’d been thinking for some time about a change of career, having accomplished more in broadcasting than I could ever have hoped. During my initial conversations at Herd Freed Hartz I kept hearing the phrase ‘executive recruiting is a people and relationships business.’  Broadcasting is very much the same; whether it’s your interviewee or your audience.  My love of storytelling was forged while working for the world’s leading broadcaster, the BBC, covering politics and breaking news, while I was fortunate to travel the globe, reporting on location at 7 Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup.

Interviewing a rich variety of top-achieving people was a highlight of the job – from the British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the second Iraq war to the fastest man on the planet Usain Bolt on the finish line of the Olympic 100 meter final, and Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey on the edge of a favela in Rio de Janeiro (that’s a story for another day). But the majority of my work has been rooted in the Pacific Northwest and I’m excited to use my skills in a new form, with my new teammates.

As I see it, I’m moving from collaborating with one type of top-tier talent to another, tied together by a common thread – that everyone has a story to tell. I’m ready to tell your company’s story, and share with you the story of your next great hire.  

Herd Freed Hartz is honored to have been named by Forbes as the top executive search firm based in the Northwest in 2018.   The firm was named #39 globally and represents a back-to-back win after also earning this honor in 2017.  “With our executive search focus in the Northwest since 2001 working with 250+ clients, we are proud to have been awarded this from Forbes.  We have an amazing team and love helping our clients find the executive talent that helps them win”, Kevin Hartz, Managing Partner and Co-Founder.

Forbes has teamed up with market research company Statista to answer that very question by producing, for the second year, our annual ranking of America’s best recruiting firms. The list is divided into two categories: one for the top 250 executive search firms specialized in filling positions with salaries of at least $100,000 and another for the top 250 professional search firms focused on placing positions with salaries of less than $100,000.

To determine the best recruiting firms, Statista surveyed 30,000 recruiters and 4,500 job candidates and human resources managers who had worked with recruitment agencies over the last three years. Respondents were asked to nominate up to 10 recruiting firms in the executive and professional search categories. Firms could not nominate themselves; last year’s findings were considered. More than 14,500 nominations were collected, and firms with the most recommendations ranked highest.  For the full Forbes article…

Recruiting firm targets construction and real estate executives in the Northwest (From 6/30/16 Daily Journal of Commerce article by Lynn Porter)

Seattle-based Herd Freed Hartz recently launched a practice group to recruit people for executive-level jobs in the real estate and construction industry.

“It’s really a reflection of the moment and the growth that’s happening in Seattle,” said managing director Scott Rabinowitz, who noted that 65 buildings are under construction downtown.

Rabinowitz was quoting a recent Downtown Seattle Association report, which also said construction expenditures for projects downtown now being built are at $3.5 billion.

Herd Freed Hartz has represented firms in real estate and construction before, but the new practice group will focus entirely on them. “Our real estate work has tripled in the last three years and it just seems like the right time to share the story and be dedicated as part of that industry,” Rabinowitz said.

Herd Freed Hartz was founded in Seattle 15 years ago and opened a Portland office in 2010, where the new practice group will also work.

The firm has clients in a range of industries, including technology, health care, finance, manufacturing, and not-for-profit. It has done searches for BECU, F5 Networks, T-Mobile, Starbucks, Getty Images, Alaska Airlines and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.

Herd Freed Hartz is a private firm with nine senior recruiters who Rabinowitz said deal directly with clients. He declined to release revenues.

Herd Freed Hartz has done senior-level searches for Seattle design firms, including NBBJ and NK Architects, for subcontractors such as Cochran Electric, for homebuilders that include Isola Homes, and for real estate firms, such as Windermere Real Estate and Zillow. And it recently found a Seattle-based market leader for self-storage properties for Rosewood Property Co., a Dallas real estate firm.

It recruited residential and commercial broker Nick Ridgeway for a Seattle job as vice president of land acquisition for Isola Homes, which primarily builds houses, including single-family and townhouses.

Ridgeway said he was finding development sites for builders as a broker for Real Property Associates when the recruiter contacted him in April.

At first, he turned them down. “I kind of branded myself, and I was just fine dealing with my clients,” he said.

But Herd Freed Hartz contacted the busy Ridgeway again, offering more detail on Isola Homes. He said the recruiting firm was excellent at conveying the vision and values of the Isola people — and he liked what those people stand for. “I am a big believer that people go to work for people not for companies,” he said.

Ridgeway said Herd Freed Hartz coached Isola on the best way to vet candidates and himself on the firm’s high expectations, so he could decide if it was a good fit.

It was an exhaustive hiring process, with meetings and a test, he said, but the recruiter made sure he was on board with the process. “This was a very professional executive-level experience,” he said.

Rabinowitz said construction and real estate companies need someone to tell their story to candidates, including those not in their network.

Those leaders want people with local connections and industry knowledge who can get projects done. “They like straight talkers who have the expertise, are detail-oriented, and do what they say they will do,” Rabinowitz said.

People in this small community know each other, which can make it more difficult to approach someone about a job.

Rick Hermanson, president of Hermanson Co., a Kent-based mechanical contractor, said Herd Freed Hartz was excellent at helping the company fill a director of human resources position.

It presented him the candidates and their qualifications every week, ranked them and kept him in the loop.

“Obviously they started out with job description,” he said. “They did a nice job of just racking it up, extracting what I was looking for, putting it in writing, and finding the right candidates that met our requirements.”

Rabinowitz said top candidates in any industry are reluctant to make a move, so you must be quick and effective in telling your client’s story. “You think it’s hard to make a bid on a house, try making a bid on somebody’s life,” he said.

Submitting a resume to an online job site can be like tossing it into a black hole, he said. “It’s an activity but not real action.”

Rabinowitz said his firm screens candidates to make the hiring process more effective.

It recruits for “C-level” jobs, such as a chief financial officer or chief marketing officer, down to the director positions.

Rabinowitz said project managers are needed for larger, complex, and more costly construction projects.

Seattle has gone at least two years beyond the typical real estate cycle, he said, and “there is a bit of hesitation that something should change soon.”

However, he said, there are dozens of projects set to start in the next year and a half, so “it looks like this market and this sector is very well positioned for a least another couple of years.”

Rabinowitz said Herd Freed Hartz is best at helping companies manage change in leadership, scale and direction, and this new real estate and construction practice group “is a sign for our firm of the importance of that sector to us.”

Last update of the article: 06/05/2020.

If you’re struggling to place the right executive in your organization, you’ve probably wondered about the merits of hiring an Executive recruiting firm. Is it worth the investment? Shouldn’t my internal HR staff, who knows and understands the needs of my organization, be able to handle the hire? The painful truth that we often remind our clients of is that it takes additional skill and proven experience to attract the top talent.

Of course, you need to aim for the best possible candidates you can get, but it’s equally important that you steer clear of wrong candidates. And while the time honored method of relying on referrals from acquaintances and colleagues seems to be the instinctive reaction when you’re trying to fill an executive role, the current business climate and the natural rate of executive turnover are both too quick so that you’re going to need assistance if you hope to stay competitive. But, that’s not all. Here are other reasons you should hire an executive recruiting firm.

You Can’t Afford Not To

It’s estimated that the wrong hire can cost your company around 15x that employee’s salary once all is said and done. As we’ve covered in another post, if you hire the wrong person at 100,000, that could wind up costing your company 1.5 million! But that’s not all. The truth is that the cost of hiring the wrong candidate for an executive position can have all sorts of consequences aside from the financial sort, especially when you take into consideration the fact that only half of all CEOs make it past 18 months in a given position.

According to a study from CareerBuildier, the direct and indirect costs of hiring the wrong candidate actually affect your current roster much more than you would have thought:

• 41% lost worker productivity
• 40%lost time due to recruiting and training a new hire
• 36% negative impact on employee morale
• 22% impact on client solutions

Consider the investment you’ll make to find the right hire, and then consider the cost you’d incur from the wrong hire. This simple cost benefit analysis of whether or not to hire an executive recruiting firm can yield particularly helpful insights.

We’re not here to fill a position, we’re here to find you the best candidate

When you hire an executive search firm, you pay for us to conduct the search, not to fill the role. Contingency recruiters are those that are paid only once arole has been filled. You might think that that route sounds like a smarter investment, but contingency recruiters are paid to find a hire, not necessarily the best hire, which could wind up hurting you.

Retained, executive search firms charge for their connections, their research, candidate vetting, their handholding and their deep understanding of your personality, company culture and even the indescribable needs of your organization and the role you’re filling.

At Herd Freed Hartz, we work with your organization to find you the best candidate that we can. We are flexible in payments and in our payment milestones, each of which are connected to the satisfaction of our client. We know your satisfaction is our number performance indicator, and nearly 90% of our work comes from repeat or referral business.

Our Time to Candidate Metric is Unbeatable

As we’ve touched on earlier, success in executive recruiting comes down to both finding the right candidate and finding them fast. At Herd Freed Hartz our average time to candidate is 37 days, which means that in that time, we will present you with the candidate that is ultimately hired for the position.

It might seem counterintuitive, but outsourcing recruiting is in fact the best way to expedite the process of filling an executive role. Why? Because it’s our only focus. Your HR team has internal tasks to manage, and you’ve other things to focus on, but we’re solely concerned with finding, and vetting the best possible candidates. We do this by first working with you to understand the needs of your organization, and then leverage our experience, networks, and connections to put together a pool of candidates that are perfectly tailored for your organization.

Peace of Mind

This is the foremost benefit that the executive search consultants at Herd Freed Hartz provide for our clients. Working for a large organization can be stressful enough and most of those that are looking to hire an executive have separate responsibilities they have to keep up with as well. We work with you, we listen to the story of your business and we do a deep dive into your operations, your team, and the skill needed for a candidate’s sucess int he given role. We also identify key goals and outcomes. Through all of this, we’ve developed a time-teste approach for targeting the ideal candidate for some of the Northwest’s largest organizations – from Zillow to Starbucks to REI to Les Schwab Tires.

An executive search partner focuses solely on offering the most value for the business during the search, reducing stress on both parties, so that by the time the first highly-qualified candidate is considered, the client and candidate are prepared equally to understand the probability of landing a successful offer.

A keyword search is no way to judge if a candidate is a good cultural fit for your organization. At Herd Freed Hartz, we go beyond the resume to find the right candidate for your organization by taking the appropriate responsibility to accurately represent your brand in the market place. We provide job descriptions that truly sizzle, helping you stand out from the competition.

So why do you need an executive search firm?

A keyword search is no way to judge if a candidate is a good cultural fit for your organization. At Herd Freed Hartz, we go beyond the resume to find the right candidate for your organization by taking the appropriate responsibility to accurately represent your brand in the market place. We provide job descriptions that truly sizzle, helping you stand out from the competition.

Interested in having HERD FREED HARTZ help with your executive recruiting? Get in touch today!