Questions we get before the first call

A contingency recruiter is paid only if you hire someone they sent, so their incentive is speed and volume, and they are usually working your role alongside a dozen others. A retained search is an exclusive engagement paid in stages regardless of outcome, which buys you the thing that actually finds senior leaders: weeks of systematic research into people who are not applying to anything. At the executive level, the candidates worth hiring are almost never in an applicant pool.

Typically ten to fourteen weeks from kickoff to signed offer for a senior technology leadership role, with the first slate of assessed candidates around week five or six. Searches run long for two reasons: the role was not properly scoped at the start, or the client’s own interview process stalls. We manage the first and nag you about the second.

Foundry Search is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and that is where most of our clients are, but senior technology leadership is a national market now. We regularly place executives who sit outside the Bay Area, and we work with companies headquartered elsewhere who want a partner embedded in this one.

Often not — and we will say so. In-house teams are usually excellent at the roles they run every week. Where an outside partner earns the fee is the role that comes up once every three years, where the candidate pool is a few hundred people nationally, where the search has to be confidential, or where the person you need is currently very happy somewhere else.

The honest answer is that it depends less on headcount than on whether there is a job for that person to do. Hiring a VP of Engineering to manage six people who are already managing themselves usually ends badly for everyone. Part of the calibration week is testing whether the role you are describing is real yet.

Dante does. The research, the outreach, the interviews, the references, and the close. That is the whole premise of a boutique, and it is why only a limited number of searches run at once.

Yes. We cannot place everyone who reaches out, and we will not pretend otherwise — but the searches we run come from a network built one conversation at a time, and today’s introduction is next year’s shortlist. If you lead engineering, product, design, or AI at a senior level, say hello.