While this benchmark data was shared in our annual report, it didn’t receive much commentary: Identifying the right executive is getting historically efficient. Since we began tracking search velocity data (both open duration before a placement is identified and open duration after a placement is identified), we are at all-time efficient numbers for ID’ing an executive. And this isn’t a quarterly thing: It has been a year since the median time to identify a placed candidate has been more than 4 weeks. Though we normally report on median performance of these numbers, it’s not just the median that’s improving. If you look at this data on a quartile basis, the 25th and 75th percentiles are getting faster, too. In fact, the 75th percentile has gotten steadily more efficient since the middle of 2022. While everyone is getting faster at finding the right executive, hiring teams do seem to be slowing their processes for hiring—at least for right now. In Q4, the time to place an executive after identifying them lengthened for the first time since Q1 2023.