Professional Search
We fill the roles that carry the work day to day: directors, senior managers, and functional leaders, with the same care most firms reserve for the executive suite.
What Professional Search should be
Most search firms save their real attention for executive roles and treat professional-level hiring as a commodity, worked by junior staff, sold on volume. We designed Professional Search to fix that: a defined process, a partner who runs the search personally, and the same operator judgment we bring to a C-suite placement, applied to the roles that actually run the business day to day.
That includes the internal and functional leadership that keeps a company moving: AR and collections, technology enablement, inventory and scheduling, logistics, sales, project and change management, vendor management, and financial management.
Talent below the surface
A job title is a starting point, not the whole search.
We look past the label on someone's business card to what they've actually done, which means the strongest fit for a role isn't always the person whose resume matches it word for word. That kind of thinking is built into how we run every professional search, not sold as a separate product.
A job posting only reaches the people who are looking.
Most director- and manager-level searches run on a posting and a queue of applicants. That reaches people who are unhappy enough to be looking, which is a small and unrepresentative slice of the people who could do the job. The strongest candidate for the seat is usually doing well in a seat somewhere else, out of reach of any posting. Finding those people takes someone who knows the market and is willing to go get them.
Why use a recruiter
Hiring in-house works, until the role is hard to fill and the person filling it is also doing their own job. Here's what changes when a dedicated search partner runs it instead.
Hiring it in-house
- Squeezed between the hiring manager's own day-to-day workload
- Reach limited to your job posting and existing network
- Screening happens whenever there's time for it
- Momentum stalls the moment someone gets busy
Handing it to us
- A partner whose job that week is filling your seat
- Direct outreach to people who aren't applying anywhere
- Evaluated by operators, with the right experience pulled in for the seat
- A structured 30/60/90-day check-in after the hire
The Ahoy Compass Report
We read the company as rigorously as we read the candidate. The Compass Report sets both sides against the same requirements, then shows exactly where they align and where they don't, instead of profiling a candidate in a vacuum and hoping the rest works out.
Structured analysis organizes and surfaces the evidence. The assessment itself is a partner's, based on documented experience, interview performance, what the role actually requires, and where the company is trying to go.
What's included
| Executive SearchExec |
Professional SearchPro | |
|---|---|---|
| A partner who runs the search personally | ||
| A fee fixed to an agreed target compensation figure | ||
| Replacement guarantee | 12 months | 90 days |
| A structured 30/60/90-day check-in | – | |
| A structured 30/90/180/300-day executive check-in | – | |
| A Compass Report for every candidate |
Have a professional-level role to fill?
Tell us about the seat and the team around it.
