Premier Executive Search Firm

Keller's Suite of Services

Identifying top talent for your leadership team is no small task. It is time-consuming, resource intensive, and hiring the wrong candidate can be costly. For this reason, many companies choose to partner with an executive search firm like Keller. While this is still a significant investment, outsourcing the executive hiring process has many benefits.

With Keller, you get access to reliable, superior-quality search services. We provide assistance in finding, screening, and nominating leaders who possess the necessary skills and mindset to make a positive difference at our clients’ firms.

Our expert market insights, global network, and alliance with NPAworldwide allow us to match employers with exceptional candidates for their leadership teams. We are even capable of reaching passive candidates and professionals who do not respond to traditional recruitment methods.

Over and above executive search, Keller provides a suite of HR consulting services. Our consultants can help design and implement a compensation and benefits framework, guide organizational change, and assist with strategic workforce planning.

Read Keller’s Insights below for our Thought Leadership content.

Keller's Approach to Executive Search

Keller is widely recognized for our personal touch and global perspective that takes into account our client’s business strategy and long-term vision. We also consider the nuances related to the locality or region of the company we are recruiting for to comprehend the factors that will influence our client’s candidate preferences. This ensures the talent we recommend is both competent and compatible with the company culture, goals, and ideals. Furthermore, it helps us secure leaders who will succeed in their new roles.

Here is a summary of our approach to staffing executive-level roles:

1. Building a Success Profile

Keller begins every search by discerning our client’s business strategy, goals, challenges, and ideology through meetings with their hiring manager and key business leaders. We compile this information into a comprehensive position profile that we use to guide the rest of the search.

2. Targeting Candidates

Building a pool of relevant, qualified candidates requires experience, innovation, and judgment. At this stage, we carefully survey the market to learn where our client’s next leader may be found. We do so without limiting ourselves to the available talent in our client’s industry, using our experience to look beyond the most obvious choices. In other words, we seek out professionals with transferable skills from other sectors who could advance our client’s goals. We then tap into our vast network, conducting extensive outreach to pinpoint potential candidates.

3. Outreach and Assessment

After discreetly establishing which professionals are interested in the position, we proceed to the evaluation phase. This involves checking each candidate’s alignment against the search parameters we determined at the outset.

We use a variety of methods to test prospects’ abilities and learn more about their career motivations, achievements, and goals for the future. We also weigh each candidate’s ability to navigate challenges and capitalize on opportunities associated with the role in question.

4. Finalist Selection and Reference Verification

The assessment phase culminates in a shortlist of thoroughly vetted, high-quality candidates that we present to the client. With it, we provide summaries on each finalist outlining their employment history, skills, and accomplishments, as well as an explanation of why they could be a good match for the company.

Next, our recruiters meet with the client, their hiring manager, and other important stakeholders to review each candidate, offer insights from our evaluations, and explore their options. From there, we help to facilitate the last round of interviews, ensuring both the client and lead candidate finish learning about each other. The interview process is accompanied by extensive reference and background checks.

5. Offer Negotiation

Keller remains an active partner throughout the final stage of the hiring process to ensure our client makes a well-informed decision. Although the client ultimately decides who they want to join their team, we provide recommendations where appropriate. We also offer advice on compensation packages and help negotiate terms.

Finally, we continue to support the client in onboarding the new executive to ensure a smooth handover.

Why Keller Utilizes a Tailored Executive Search Strategy

Keller boasts expert executive recruiters with a knack for locating exceptional talent for leadership roles. Given their years of first-hand experience, they contribute a wealth of expertise to our executive search approach.

We acknowledge this in light of the fact that Keller was not always as well-equipped to lead executive searches as we are now. Indeed, we discovered this the hard way while we were still a young firm. At that point in our company’s history, our search approach was little more than a one-size-fits-all method that overlooked the unique differences between clients. However, this changed when we realized the limitations of this approach for sourcing candidates for senior leadership roles.

As several members of our team may recall, we received a request from a client asking us to help recruit someone for a high-level role at their organization. We took the opportunity, believing our generic approach would be enough. We were sorely mistaken, however, as the candidate we recommended was not cut out for our client’s organizational culture—a mistake that led to the candidate’s untimely departure from the company.

This setback forced us to reflect on our current approach and gave us the push we needed to transform it into the one we use today. We now offer bespoke executive talent solutions specifically designed to accommodate each client’s unique requirements. This transformation has endowed us with a ranking among the world’s best executive search firms and has made Keller’s name synonymous with recruitment excellence.

The Value of Choosing Keller as your Executive Search Partner

Appointing the wrong leader can have severe consequences for your business, resulting in wasted resources and opportunities. Partnering with a reliable executive recruiter like Keller reduces this risk and provides you with a safety net should a placement issue arise. Collaborating with us can help ensure leadership success in other ways, too:

1. Access to a Global Pool of Candidates

Keller is an executive search firm with global reach, meaning we have access to a vast database of candidates through our industry connections. This includes passive candidates who are not actively seeking a new position but may be open to opportunities. This is advantageous for organizations looking to fill senior roles as a wider selection of candidates provides a better chance of attracting the right person for their team.

2. Saves Time and Money

Keller conducts a targeted search for candidates, proactively identifying individuals who could be a good match for our client’s position. This includes reaching out to professionals who are not actively job hunting, leaving no stone unturned in our search. Our relentless pursuit of excellence, combined with our consultants’ extensive market insights, are proven to produce results and save organizations time and money in the long run.

Additionally, our fees can be offset by the time and resources we save by simplifying the recruitment process. Partnering with us also reduces the risk of hiring the wrong person and incurring more costs as a result.

3. Live Market Intelligence

One of our goals during every engagement is to develop a consultative relationship with our clientele. Our executive recruiters are equipped with live market data pertaining to each search that will help clients understand the talent landscape, compensation benchmarks, their employer brand, the strength of competitor talent, and more. This data can be used to attract an even better candidate than our client initially sought to recruit, or reshape the role they had in mind. Ultimately, the candidate they choose may be capable of adding even more value to the business than they imagined.

In addition to live market intelligence, our consultants possess deep industry and functional expertise that they use to inform the search. They also know the type of skills and qualities candidates need to thrive in roles such as CEO, VP, and Director.

4. Strategic Advice and Objectivity

Keller is a true partner in executive search, providing guidance and advice throughout the hiring journey. As a neutral third party, we offer unbiased feedback on candidates and can help settle internal conflicts of opinion when it comes to selecting a candidate. All in all, our goal is to support and guide you in making important hiring decisions that have an effect on your organization’s future.

5. Thorough Vetting

C-suite and executive-level recruiting require candidates to be thoroughly screened to ensure precise alignment with the role and the client’s organization. Keller performs a rigorous assessment of every prospect as part of the executive search process, which includes competency-based interviews and psychometric testing to ensure leaders are the perfect fit for their new teams.

6. Confidentiality and Transparency

At Keller, our consultants maintain complete transparency with clients at all times, providing regular status reports and keeping communication channels open. We always keep clients in the loop so they know exactly what our consultants are doing, which candidate engagement methods they use, and how candidates are benchmarked.

Furthermore, our consultants uphold a high-level of confidentiality during every search, thereby protecting the hiring company and the professionals involved.

Keller's Guarantee

Over the years, Keller has honed our executive search approach and we will continue to adapt to ensure our services remain up-to-date and relevant to the times. We pay close attention to the unique challenges and cultures of the organizations we serve, becoming an extension of our clients’ HR teams. Thus, we strive to provide a service that is nothing short of excellent.

Our executive search firm is also committed to diverse hiring practices and recognizes the value people from many backgrounds can add to a company. As such, we endeavor to eliminate unconscious bias from our hiring process, only evaluating prospects based on their professional merits and not factors related to gender, age, or race. In doing so, we hope to cultivate more inclusive workplaces.

As a leading executive search and recruitment firm, Keller has earned a lasting reputation for reliable, high-quality talent solutions. However, we recognize that no approach is infallible, including ours. Because of this, we promise to replace any candidate of ours that does not live up to standards or resigns before the end of their 90-day probation period. We offer this guarantee free of charge provided the client notifies us of the placement concern within this timeframe.

Finally, we encourage all forms of customer feedback in light of our commitment to customer satisfaction. These opinions are used to shape our services, ensuring they stay current in today’s turbulent business environment.

Contact us today and learn how we can help you secure the right human resources for your needs.