Questions new clients ask us

We have helped our clients find highly skilled, culturally aligned, and high performing  employees since 2016. They have enabled our clients to improve, strengthen and ultimately add value to their company. Our business model is to become a trusted advisor to our clients as opposed to a transactional supplier.

One of the side advantages of using the Executive Search methodology is you gain invaluable market intelligence by us searching the whole of the talent pool, which is usually a large part of your industry sector.

Outplacement
We assist employees who are placed into a situation where they have to leave employment within the company. This is similar to our career coaching program but also helps people to get into the right frame of mind after a redundancy. Over an eight week period we will meet the person twice in person and twice online and guide them to create a career plan and make sure their LinkedIn and CV profiles and interview skills are optimal.

Talent Mapping
This is effectively asking us to look at all the relevant talent in one or more countries in a particular industry with a particular skill set. You receive details on usually around 80 to 100 good quality candidates. No approaches will be made to these people and this is a market intelligence gathering exercise only.

Career Coaching
Over an eight week period we will meet the person usually three times in person and once online and guide them to create a career plan and make sure their LinkedIn and CV profiles and interview skills are optimal.

Salary Surveys
We will use a combination of economic data, multiple published salary guides and our own knowledge of candidates existing packages, to present you with the market expectations of salaries for multiple positions.

We’re committed to being always transparent when it comes to fees. There is rarely any additional costs and if they are, they must be approved by you in advance. These may be additional travel or meeting room hire costs etc.

Typically all Executive Search assignment fees are split into three stages, usually 33% per stage:

Research Stage Fee: Invoiced at the start of an assignment.
Interview Stage Fee: Invoiced on submission of an agreed candidate shortlist (Usually 3-6 candidates).
Appointment Fee: Invoiced on a signed employment contract.

We have three groups of competitors:

Firstly companies who recruit themselves. An external recruitment fee has to be weighed up against the internal overheads of your own staff doing this. Unless you have an established internal HR and recruitment team, this usually involves the ‘friends and family’ option. This is generally recognised as the least successful way to hire good long term talent.

Secondly, we compete against High Street recruiters who operate a model known as Contingent recruiting which is sometimes referred to as ‘no foal, no fee’. This leads to you hiring a supplier that you do not pay and after two or three weeks they move on. It is no surprise that the term contingent actually means ‘by chance.’

Finally, about 15% of recruiters operate in the Executive Search space which means on a retained and exclusive basis. This takes a week or two longer to deliver and costs a bit more than Contingent recruiters but is widely acknowledged as the most effective way to hire the best fitting people to fill your vacancies.

The workplace environment since Covid has changed significantly and the principle of a six month warranty still stands as our default position but in certain industries and in certain types of positions, we reserve the right to offer the warranty at an additional cost.
Having said that, for us, the traditional recruitment model of offering a discounted price on a sliding scale, does not work for you, the client. Essentially, this means you have paid money out on a candidate that has not performed as expected and you’re ultimately left with the same problem – an unfilled vacancy for a much-needed senior member of your team. So to repeat, the principle of a six month warranty still stands as our default position.

We would expect any potential new client to want to take references including speaking to our current or previous clients. We can arrange this for you.

All hires are different and, therefore, we usually bespoke our fee structure to take account of this. There are no hidden costs and fees are split into three:

Research Stage Fee: Invoiced at the start of an assignment.
Interview Stage Fee: Invoiced on submission of an agreed candidate shortlist (Usually 3-6 candidates).
Appointment Fee: Invoiced on a signed employment contract.

Yes!

Increasingly we are doing more business outside of Ireland either for Irish companies looking to hire in other markets or international companies looking to build a management team in advance of their arrival into Ireland.

In 2022, we became the Irish partner in the Kennedy Executive Search global network of independent boutique executive search companies. This has greatly transformed our business and we are now exposed to best practice and emerging ideas from our colleagues in 15 other countries. In addition, we now have a greater ability to carry out cross-border recruiting assignments.

You can see more about Kennedy here: https://vistasearch.ie/employers/international/

Kennedy are located in Europe, USA, and Latin America with offices in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Denver, Dublin, Frankfurt, Ghent, Gothenburg, Madrid, Mexico City, Miami, Milan, Monaco, Munich, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Salzburg, Sao Paulo, Warsaw and Zurich.

We are very proud of our case studies and you can examples of recent assignments that we have completed here: https://vistasearch.ie/employers/executive-search/