EXECUTIVE SEARCH
Building a strong, cohesive senior leadership team is no easy matter. Identifying and recruiting talented leaders—the first step—can be the biggest challenge of all.
Bridgespan’s executive search services are designed to help manage the process and guide you to find candidates who can help deliver on your organization’s mission.
PRACTICE
We work with both nonprofits and foundations in many parts of the sector (e.g., youth development, education, environment, community development). In general, we focus on organizations and fields that historically have had minimal access to traditional executive search services.
Bridgespan executive search services are characterized by:
Focus on nonprofit senior leaders
Bridgespan’s executive search consultants serve organizations seeking to secure talent at the senior level. We recruit for roles that report to the executive director/CEO; for example, chief operating officer; chief financial officer; VP/director of marketing, human resources, external affairs, and evaluation.
With few exceptions, we do not recruit for executive director, fund development, or program-specific roles as these searches are better suited to specialists in those areas. Our search consultants do, however, provide a la carte advisory services which include writing job descriptions, professional referencing, needs assessment, and development of candidate screening templates, particularly those that are not of sufficient scale to justify the investment necessary for a full search.
Experience and expertise
Our team has more than 100 years of combined experience with top-tier executive search and human capital consulting firms. We have proudly placed senior managers in nonprofit organizations across a variety of domains.
Deep networks
Organizations creating new roles or seeking new pools of talent may need to broaden their searches and access new networks, or try different approaches to recruiting. Bridgespan’s talent pool comes from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors and from all nonprofit domains. We have deep and strong candidate networks, particularly for key functional roles, augmented by our ties to Bridgestar, the Bridgespan initiative devoted to nonprofit careers.
Mission driven; committed to capacity-building
We are dedicated not only to helping organizations secure the right people but also to helping organizations develop their own recruiting capacity. As a nonprofit organization ourselves, we share our knowledge freely with our clients and with the broader nonprofit sector.
Online content and tools
Bridgespan’s services are supported by online resources which include the Bridgestar job board and content dedicated to recruiting best practices. Sharing our expertise in recruiting for key functional roles, such as chief operating officers and chief financial officers, and developing new pools of talent from other sectors (bridgers), are integral to our mission.
Customized fee-based pricing
Our services are fully retained, with a flat-fee pricing structure based on the complexity of the project. Search consultants work with each client organization to establish the category of services that best suits its recruiting and budgetary requirements. Our recommendations range from conducting full search projects to targeted advisory services that equip the client organization to conduct its own search process more efficiently and effectively.
ESTABLISHING SEARCH RELATIONSHIPS
In establishing relationships, we consider the following criteria:
• Social impact: Is the organization’s mission aligned with our goal of widening access to executive search services and delivering more talent and capacity to serve constituents?
• Knowledge generation: Will the engagement lead to the production of knowledge that might be relevant to other leaders in the nonprofit sector?
• Bridgespan’s capability: Is the assignment a fit with our service design? (Note that we do not typically recruit for executive director, fund development, or program-specific positions; however, we do provide advisory services for these roles.)
• Capacity to act: Is the organization prepared to act as our partner in the engagement—and to build its own capacity to establish best hiring practices internally?
For information about Bridgespan’s executive search services, please contact us at executivesearch@bridgespan.org or (617) 572-2118.
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