Role-Focused Search: Accelerating Leader Recruiting in a Tight Market

I like to say, “It takes an exceptional team to build exceptional teams.”

But I probably could just as well say, “It takes an exceptional team with exceptional focus to build exceptional teams.”

At Bespoke, we do have an exceptional team that knows how to find and recruit high-impact leaders for private equity-backed portfolio companies in software. 

This is why our team continues to find transformative leaders for our clients despite the extraordinarily tight labor market.

And part of the reason our team is so successful is because we align our search professionals to focus on a particular role.

We call these Dedicated Practices and the members of these practice teams concentrate on searches for particular roles, all day every day. 

This week we announced three new dedicated practices, expanding our official count to five. 

Our previously announced practices,  CEO and Board Members and CFOs, are now joined by practices dedicated to Go-to-Market leaders, Talent & Human Resources Leaders, and Technology Leaders.

We actually have operated this way for years. The recent announcements are just formalizing the dedicated practices and showing how we use this approach to accelerate search and produce better outcomes.

We align the search effort around roles because this singular focus brings about major benefits for efficient and successful search. These benefits include:

• In-depth understanding the skill sets and experience needed for a particular role in a particular type of company.
• Unique insight into how key leadership roles can drive growth and value creation on the path to achieving the investment thesis for a portfolio company.
• Longstanding experience in applying data-driven assessment and analysis to identify the best candidates for a particular role earlier in the process.
• More extensive networks that include more experienced candidates for the roles.
• Greater awareness of key market trends within the targeted roles, including types of candidates, compensation trends, interview best practices, and other insights.

The net result of these benefits is that searches are faster, slicing weeks off the industry average search time. Placements are also more successful. Our current placement success rate of 99% is due in large part to the in-depth focus we have on what makes a candidate the best fit.

This approach also enables us to apply our data-driven Search 2.0 process to every search. Search 2.0 applies management science to search. For example, our unique FIT Profile framework uses state-of-the-art assessments and our human capital advisory methodology to accelerate search and produce better results at the same time.

As we formally launch these new dedicated practices, our practice leaders share some insights on how their domains are trending.

Technology Leaders

Partner Jeff Campbell and Senior Vice President Ned Lanphier co-lead our Technology Leader practice. Their team concentrates on placing Chief Product Officers and Chief Technology Officers in our clients’ software and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) portfolio companies.

“Leaders who drive innovation create crucial value for a portfolio company,” Ned explains. “The technical intellectual property that these leaders generate through product development and by articulating a vision of innovation can shape an industry and define an investment.

“Highly adept technology leaders also recognize and manage product issues that can affect long-term product viability and development economics, such as mitigating the impact of technical debt on roadmaps and development cycles.”

“There is a direct line between a technology leader’s performance and the ultimate outcomes for a software company. A high-impact technology leader can deliver an innovative product that disrupts the market and drives value creation for a portfolio company.”

Go-to-Market Leaders

Go-to-Market leaders are in incredibly high demand these days because of record deal volumes fueling competition. These leaders include the sales and marketing executives who are directly responsible for driving sales growth and expanding a portfolio company’s market footprint. Partner Tess Fischer leads this team in finding high-performance leaders who know how to generate and close massive sales pipelines for software companies.

“Go-to-market skills are always in demand, especially for portfolio companies with market and revenue growth plans driving toward an investment thesis,” Tess says. “These skills are in even greater demand right now as the private equity space is experiencing record-setting deal volume. That competition means sales and marketing leaders who know how to execute are even more highly prized.”

Our Vice President Katherine Baker has a key leadership role in our GTM searches and she cites the link between effective sales and marketing leadership and the achievement of an investment thesis. 

“Naturally, an investment thesis depends heavily on a targeted level of growth in company revenues,” Katherine explains. “The partnership between sales, marketing, product, needs to be extremely well aligned in order to effectively execute against growth plans, drive demand, and help expand the addressable market.” 

Vice President Jenny Gray agrees. In her role leading searches for Chief Customer Officers and Customer Success Leaders, Jenny sees that the customer success function has evolved from a technical customer support discipline and reactive account management into a proactive function, highly focused on predictive metrics.

“Customer success of course depends heavily on the technical aspects of the customer’s experience with your product or services,” Jenny says. “But the customer success function itself has expanded beyond that to consider the entire customer journey and every touchpoint and contact with the company. 

“Our clients are moving from reactive account management models to building proactive, data-driven customer success teams. Establishing a modern approach to customer success is essential to evolving as a successful SaaS business.”

Human Resources Leaders

People are the key to achieving an investment thesis. The leader of our Talent & Human Resources practice, Vice President Alex Bossetta, explains that human capital management is widely recognized as critical for creating outsized value in the private equity industry.

“It really is all about people and how they perform, and now there’s a need more than ever for the right strategic human capital leadership in software organizations,” she says. 

“Of course financial engineering plays an essential role in achieving an investment thesis as it always has in our space. But driving growth and executing on strategy are heavily dependent on culture, talent recruiting and management, team motivation, incentives and other human resources practices.”

Alex’s practice focuses on Chief People Officers, Chief Human Resources Officers, talent management leaders and others who deliver human capital management excellence in portfolio companies.

CEO & CFO Practices Surge

Our practices focusing on CEO search and CFO search were announced last fall. These practices posted banner years in 2021 and hit key milestones, with both passing 100 successful search placements.

“CFOs are naturally central to a private equity firm’s investment thesis for its portfolio companies,” says Partner Katelyn Quaresma, who heads our CFO practice with Partner, Nick Donlan.

“Today’s most in-demand CFOs know how to orchestrate strategic initiatives for creating portfolio company value, such as M&A and deploying capital for operational expansion,” Katelyn explains. “The most successful CFOs are as much about steering the company strategically as they are about operational discipline and managing financial controls.”

On the CEO side, demand is up for top executives who have go-to-market experience,  according to Partner Brian Waivada, who leads our CEO practice.

“The flood of capital into software means that competition is fierce,” he says. “So top leaders who know how to ramp sales, capture market share and land new customers are bringing the right tools for the job in this environment.

“That’s not to say CEOs with other track records are not being successful, just that CEOs with the ability to drive growth with sales and marketing are in the spotlight today.”

About that 99% Success Rate …

As I mentioned, this alignment of our teams around roles is a chief reason for our success rate, which passed 99% last year. We define placement success as a placed executive who stays for at least two years.

A team that is focused like a laser on what makes an executive successful in a particular role is much more likely to find and place leaders who will be a fit.

That’s where our FIT Profile comes in. The FIT Profile provides a comprehensive view of how a candidate would complement a leadership team, how they compare to the role scorecard, and ultimately how they would address the needs of the broader company.

“The FIT Profile produces great insight in exactly what is needed in the role based on the health of the company and dynamics of the leadership team.”

Our Leadership Advisory Practice, which conducts the state-of-the-art assessments behind the FIT Profile, it becomes very clear very quickly which leadership skills are needed to execute on the plan to achieve an investment thesis.

As a result, our dedicated teams use the FIT Profile to identify the most qualified candidates earlier in the process, consistently completing searches significantly faster than the industry average.

Ready to see how a dedicated search team and the FIT Profile can bring you the best leader in a very short timeframe? Drop us a note to get started today.

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