The Executive Search industry, who recruit for businesses at the leadership level, has experienced rocketing growth in technology and telecoms firms retaining their services in order to make leadership team hires.
Net Fee Income (NFI) from Technology and Telecoms firms retaining Search firm services for hires above £200,000 grew by 24.2% over the period 2016-2017 to 2017-2018. Searches for this type of hire now make up 14.8% of NFI for the Search industry making hires above £200,000.
Only the financial services sector (34.1%) and industrial sector (17.0%) make-up a greater proportion of income for the Search industry at this level.
Comments from Eli Fathi, CEO at Mindbridge, a tech start-up, suggest that the tech sector is increasingly turning to Search firms to assist with leadership talent acquisition because, in part, start-up firms are beginning to realise the benefit of hiring an experienced C-suite team early on. Speaking to Real Ventures, he said:
“You have to get in very quickly, as long as you can afford them. If you can do it immediately, it’s better.”
Only the financial services sector, the consumer sector and the industrial sector made up a higher proportion of income for the Executive Search industry than technology sector clients.
The Executive recruitment industry has, overall, shown resilience. NFI growth for the hires above £200,000 market has grown 5.8% whilst the NFI for the hiring market below £200,000 grew 4.0%. This vastly outstrips growth for UK GDP which was 1.8% during 2017 and sat at 0.2% during the first quarter of 2018.
Alex Cormack, Group Managing Director, Sheffield Haworth noted several reasons why Search is still doing well.
“From an industry perspective, clients are requesting more innovative, flexible and tailor-made solutions to their talent issues," he said. "This is leading to high demand from our clients for advice and partnership around talent identification, executive search, succession planning and diversity and inclusion issues across all sectors and regions.”
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