Our Ethical Commitments to Clients and Candidates

Our team is proud to partner with national and global organizations working to make the world better for others, from advancing equity in higher education to revolutionizing patient-centered healthcare. In serving the nonprofit and association communities, we recognize the challenges of mission-driven work: operating with limited staff and tight budgets while aiming to make a substantial impact.

Our goal is to bridge this gap by connecting these organizations with top-performing, professionals, helping them build more diverse and effective teams with each new hire.

We uphold these commitments in every area of our work. Here’s how.

We Use Smart Tech and Smarter Processes

• Project management you can count on. Our 11-person team works together on every search, reducing the time to hire without sacrificing quality or service. We provide an accurate project timeline, handle all scheduling and administrative tasks, and ensure you know exactly what we are managing and when we’ll need your time. We keep detailed records of every conversation, so you only need to provide information once.
• No fluffy deliverables. Our deliverables aren’t just pretty documents. They are designed to support decision-making. We provide data-rich weekly status updates, candidate-written summaries describing relevant skills, interview questions with an evaluation matrix, an online portal with all candidate materials at your fingertips, and more.
• Human expertise backed by AI. We use generative AI and process automation to improve workflows and save time on repetitive tasks while prioritizing human judgment and personal interaction at every decision point. While we love the efficiency of technology, humans are always in the loop. We never use AI to evaluate candidates. Ever.

We Give You Data, Not Opinions

• Putting the research into practice. Our approach is based on the latest hiring research, designed to emphasize factors proven to predict job performance while reducing the impact of factors that do not.
• Skills-first, always. Too often, hiring decisions are based on gut feelings or vague ideas of “fit,” which can unintentionally exclude great candidates and leads to inconsistent results. We focus on the skills required for success with an interview sequence designed to reveal each candidate’s abilities in different settings. Clients get objective data to support the hiring decision, greatly reducing the risk of a bad hire.

We Walk the Walk on Inclusive Hiring

• Diversity drives success. Extensive research shows that when teams have a wide range of perspectives to draw from, they work harder and smarter—that’s what drives business results. And that’s precisely what we emphasize in the search process. Our competency-driven approach helps clients see diversity as an advantage in building more effective teams.
• Not your typical sourcing strategy. We don’t rely on the “who do you know” approach because it overlooks a vast number of candidates and often results in a less diverse group. We have developed an intensive research process to surface hundreds of passive candidates (those not actively looking but who may be interested in new opportunities) for every search.
• Bringing forward the best of the best. We don’t broaden the range of candidates considered for a role just to drive up numbers. We take an inclusive approach so clients can choose the best out of a larger, more diverse pool: think best in the nation vs. best in your town. Through rigorous evaluation, the most talented people always rise to the top.

We Elevate the Candidate Experience

• Candidates deserve transparency. We take the utmost care to ensure candidates have a positive experience. We are transparent about what to expect in the interview sequence, including timing, who will be involved, and how any information will be used and evaluated.
• Tips from the recruiting pros. Although we don’t offer resume writing or career coaching services, we develop and share practical resources to help candidates navigate their job search and career changes.
• We take privacy seriously. We never share candidate materials or contact information with any clients or third parties without prior consent.

We’re Always Innovating

• Ever learning, ever evolving. As our clients navigate the evolution of work, our team is right there, learning and growing too. Our guidance is shaped by our own experience and research into current topics in hiring, including pay transparency, AI, and hybrid and remote work models.
• No gatekeeping here. We share what we learn in our blog, monthly newsletter, and the how-to guides on our website. We want to equip our clients—and any organization—with the tools to improve their hiring practices and create teams where everyone can do their best work.

We Deliver Results, Guaranteed

• We stand behind our work. We offer an unconditional 18-month replacement guarantee for senior staff searches and a 2-year guarantee for CEO placements.

Living Our Commitments

Our ethical commitments are more than words on a page—they are the foundation of our service and the compass guiding our daily actions. Living these principles drives us to innovate, improve, and deliver hiring results that propel mission-driven organizations forward. We don’t see our work as just filling positions; we’re here to elevate teams and amplify the impact of the people we serve.

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Don’t Stop Here

• People often say hiring and retaining top performers is unpredictable. But it doesn’t have to be. Read our guide to Results-Based Hiring® for an overview of the approach that has helped hundreds of mission-driven organizations hire leaders who deliver results.
• Dig into the research behind our approach with the Case for Competency-Driven Hiring. You’ll learn the reasons why commonplace hiring practices so often fail us and, importantly, what you can do instead.
• Check out more practical guides that can help you apply elements of our approach on your own and start hiring better with a skills-based approach.