The executive search market took awhile to get started in Q1, with the bulk of the quarter’s 7% growth coming in the latter part of the quarter—a development that makes Q1 seem like an incomplete story, since the most consequential developments happened just two days after the quarter’s end.

Our quarterly reports are always recaps and analyses of what happened within the quarter that just closed, but it’s impossible to discuss the late-quarter momentum without pointing to the April 2 tariffs and their resulting uncertainties. It’s too early into Q2 to see ripple effects into executive search, so we’ll save that reporting, and, for now, make note of the fact that the industry’s most noteworthy developments happened outside of the quarter we’re covering here.

While what happens next is anyone’s guess, there are signs from Q1 as to how the executive search market may continue to play out—especially when viewed against early Q2’s stock market reactions.

Across the board, one of Q1’s unifying themes was outsized winners:

• AI also carried the day from a public markets perspective, with CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider, staking claim to the biggest tech IPO since 2021. Globally, the IPO market posted gains in both volume and value, according to EY data, with IPO value up 20% year-over-year.
• In Private Equity, Sycamore Partners’ take-private of Walgreens Boots Alliance accounted for more than 9% of Q1’s total deal value. It was the largest take-private in the last two years, according to Pitchbook data, and may be a indicator of things to come: a depressed public market, combined with better credit conditions and PE’s dry powder has the potential to create an active take-private market.
• Venture Capital was even more top-heavy. Though headlines abound about AI investments, they still comprise just 28% of VC deals globally and 33% of VC deals in the US. While that share of deal count remains surprisingly small given the headlines, the share of deal value does not: AI investments make up nearly 58% of deal value globally and, in the US specifically, that figure is more than 71%.

And within executive search, you can see shadows from the macro economic conditions casting their way onto asset class-specific developments:

• Public company openings dropped 1% in Q1 but closed searches fell 9%, keeping fairly in line with the S&P’s -4% quarter and the Nasdaq’s -10% quarter.
• Newly opened searches in Private Equity jumped 20% quarter-over-quarter, with nearly all of those gains coming from in the form of CEO and Finance recruiting.
• Venture Capital saw a more modest 5% QoQ increase in opened searches, but notably saw stronger 9% QoQ growth at Seed/Series A (which, according to Pitchbook data, saw 10%+ increases median deal values).

Against this backdrop, median compensation dropped 3% QoQ—a fairly uncommon phenomenon for executive compensation. Notably, the bulk of that drop came in the form of base compensation. In the last several quarters, the majority of the compensation gains were created by making bonuses richer, so it appears companies are still focused on heavier performance-based compensation structures.

All of this, of course, feels very in flux at the moment.

Time will tell if Q1’s late momentum carries through even uncertain times or if the market will hit a reset. To be continued.

About the Report

This report was developed to provide executive recruiters and talent leaders with data-backed insights to help them both gain a better understanding of the industry, market, and environment they operate in and make more informed decisions.

We anonymized and aggregated our data from more than 31,000 compensation and search records to construct the benchmarks, statistics, and trends you will see in this report. We also cross-referenced relevant industry analysis and sources to understand how leadership recruiting is being impacted by rapidly evolving macro and socioeconomic events, in addition to recent extreme volatility in growth markets.

Asset Class Breakdown

Function Breakdown

Our data and combined research uncovered leading indicators for executive hiring, how public and private market fluctuations impact demand for leadership hiring, why VCs have been impacted more than others, what the forecast is for leadership hiring over the next few quarters, as well as trends with executive compensation benchmarks.