Thrive TRM

Talent Partners: Feeling bogged down by spreadsheets and disconnected data? You’re not alone. A recent survey found that Talent Partners spend most of their time on four key activities: 1. Advising portfolio companies on recruiting matters 2. Managing the firm’s collective executive talent network 3.?Managing search firm relationships and oversight of executive searches across the portfolio 4. Advising portfolio companies on compensation matters Each of these tasks requires different data—often spread across multiple systems and spreadsheets. On Wednesday, February 26, join us for a conversation on 10 key metrics for talent partners, why they matter, and how Thrive can help you centralize this data. ?? Register below.

Newly placed executives were down about 15% MoM and YoY in February. - The slow-down tracks with the YoY Q4 2024 slowdown we saw for opened roles. - Newly opened roles ended up 12% MoM, after 15% MoM growth in January, so expect closed searches to climb as we head into Q2.

For executive search firms supporting Talent Partners, it’s crucial to understand the key questions they need answered. Founders and operating partners often ask about: - Compensation trends for benchmarking - Which search firms to partner with for future roles By turning your executive data into actionable insights, you can help Talent Partners make informed decisions, optimize strategies, and stay ahead of trends—ultimately adding more value to your partnerships. Join our webinar to see how Thrive’s dashboards can help you deliver these insights. Register below.

Healthcare, Life Sciences and Technology were the only industries to show year-over-year growth last quarter, showing just how significant the Q4 slowdown was. - Leadership demand in Technology was up 12% YoY, but down 8% QoQ in Q4. That YoY growth was primarily PE-owned (+31%) and early-stage VC-backed companies (+59%). - Healthcare & Life Sciences was the only industry to post YoY (+34%) and QoQ (+27%). - One of the biggest losers? PE-owned Financial Services saw leadership demand drop 22% QoQ and 28% YoY.

Closed search volume dropped 5% month over month in January, but grew 5% year over year. - While we shared open search volume trends last week, closed search trends have much more year-to-year variability in January. - For the last two years, January’s YoY closed search trend has been a predictor of the year’s closed search trend with the rate of change being within 1.5 raw percentage points. - For the last year, closed search volume has been very steady, with little month-to-month variance.

Executive search volume grew 15% month-over-month to start the year, the slowest start to the year we’ve seen in our dataset. - Historically, January’s MoM growth numbers are closer to 40% growth in newly opened roles over December. - From a raw numbers perspective, January’s opened search total was the lowest we’ve seen since January 2020. - Year over year, January’s opened search totals were down 22%.

CEOs are the only roles with sustained demand on a QoQ and YoY basis. In fact, it’s the only role where demand has grown since the COVID hiring boom. - Sales and Business Development roles, which have operated at elevated levels, dropped 2% QoQ and 7% YoY. - Product and Engineering roles have dropped 42% from their peak in late 2021. - Seniority-wise, C-level roles continue to grow in their share of opened searches, hitting 45% in Q4—the highest level we’ve seen. Read our Q4 report?for more hiring trends: https://lnkd.in/gTYkAyqP

Median OTE for newly hired executives rose 12% year-over-year in Q4 to $460,000. - Median base compensation rose just north of 8%, but it was bonus compensation that saw the most increase, growing by 23%. - As an asset class, VC was the largest gains, with median OTE growing 17% - YoY, followed by public companies, which saw median OTE grow 13% YoY. PE, meanwhile, was a much more measured 3% gain. Read our Q4 report for the latest exec comp data:?https://lnkd.in/gTYkAyqP

While the executive search market posted a modest 3.5% growth in newly opened searches for the year, most of the gains were frontloaded. By the end of 2024, demand for leadership hiring had dropped each quarter, despite the S&P’s continued climb. This shift has brought the market back to levels not seen since Q4 2022. CEO and Sales roles are the only ones showing growth, with searches up 15% compared to Q4 2022. Everything else? Roughly flat, struggling to maintain momentum—if it ever found it. Curious about the full picture? Check out our latest quarterly report for more insights. Link in comments.

More than 50% of talent partners say one of their top obstacles remains consolidating and enriching talent data, but less than 15% plan to explore traditional CRMs to help solve the problem. While the above insight comes from True’s latest Talent Partner survey, we felt it was worth sharing with the larger executive search community, because the solution that talent partners—and we’d guess much the rest of the market—are looking to is AI-powered talent intelligence and talent discovery. More than 40% of talent partners said that would be their top technology to explore in 2025. In the coming weeks, we’ll include more analysis from True’s latest talent partner survey (link in comments) in our annual report.