Table of Contents 2024 Overview For three years or so, we’ve put in this space the strong link between the S&P 500 and leadership demand, showing that executive hiring went the way the market went. 2024 appears to be the year that broke. The executive search market grew modestly in 2024, posting a 3.5% gain in newly opened searches for the year. Those gains, however, were front loaded in a year that started optimistically and limped to the finish. In fact, every quarter of 2024 posted quarter-over-quarter declines in demand for leadership hiring while the S&P kept climbing hiring. The development put the executive search market as close as its been to its low-water market in Q4 2022. And it hits every asset class and function in a near equal fashion. Comparing Q4 2024 to Q4 2022, CEO and Sales roles the only two that are opening at a level that’s at least 15% higher than Q4 2022. Everything else is roughly flat, struggling to keep market momentum—if it had been found at all. Similarly, from an asset class perspective, Venture Capital-backed hiring continues to operate at or below its Q4 2022 numbers and Private Equity-owned hiring cannot find momentum to post sustained demand on a quarter-over-quarter basis. These struggles, of course, map to macro challenges—none of which are all that new (at least when it comes to the private markets): While Venture Capital dollars continue to fuel the AI startup market, much of that funding is heavily concentrated. According to Pitchbook, there were 15 deals of more than $1B in 2024, comprising more than 26% of all funding. And while those heavily concentrated bets are being made, VC has yet to see its previous bets cash out. Exits of $500 million or more have accounted for just 3.6% of exits (but nearly 79% of deal value) in the last year. Private Equity, meanwhile, saw progress—but at the expense of fundraising. Deal count increased 13% in 2024 and deal value grew 19%, thanks in part to growth in technology and more $1B+ deals. With deal activity on the rise, but fundraising slipping (down nearly 30% in 2024), PE’s dry powder “problem” may resolve itself. In the public markets, the S&P 500 continued its reliance on the Mag 7, with those stocks now accounting for 33% of the index—the highest ever such concentration. And while these stocks continue their run of strong returns, it’s this concentration, perhaps, that explains why our link between the S&P’s performance and opened executive searches has broken so soundly: removing those stocks from the index, the rest of the market has been flat for nearly two years. The confounding part, it seems, is how expectations even late in the year failed to materialize. With an election cycle out of the way, and expected policy changes that would create a more business-friendly environment, there was expectation that the markets would begin to open up while rates continued to drop. But inflation and 10-year Treasury yields remain higher than targets, and the Fed has signaled that it now expects to cut rates more slowly in 2025. So while the mid-year “lull” of 2024 could be explained away as potentially expected, the end of year developments feel like another reset on finally finding firm footing. Still, if an improved M&A market does develop as expected, we may still get there. Looking for vertical-specific insights and compensation data? Fill out the form below to get the full report.