EP15 - A Bias Free Disruption of the $50 Billion Executive Search Industry

ExecThread isn't a recruiting firm. It is a platform, a community, a marketplace, trying to do something that's paradigm-shifting in the executive recruiting market by using a unique crowdsourced approach to bring much-needed transparency to the ‘hidden job market’. ExecThread has amassed ~15,000 retained executive searches to-date, and made them available on the platform to their members.

When Joe Meyer decided to test the waters for a new executive-level role after his time spent at Apple following the acquisition of his last start-up, he found the process excruciatingly inefficient. A large part of that frustration lies in the fact that the vast majority of executive-level job opportunities that you often want to pursue aren’t publicly-posted, and hence are hard (if not impossible) to access.

These are often the confidential job opportunities worked on by retained executive search firms, though the only chance you have of finding out about them is if you're directly approached by the recruiter, or someone in your network tells you about them.

And the chances of that happening are pretty slim. Even if you are well-pursued by executive recruiters, you're still only finding out about a sliver, a microscopic sliver of the opportunities out there. So Joe decided to solve that problem by bringing more transparency to these much sought-after opportunities.

What he built was ExecThread, a close-knit exclusive network where members help each other by sharing career opportunities, vetting other applicants for membership, and breaking down the traditional barriers of the executive search ecosystem

What also came out of the build-out of this highly curated network was another remarkable outcome.

Nearly half of the ExecThread’s 50,000 members come from underrepresented groups (which over-indexes the national average at the executive-level by over 2x), an unintentional outcome driven by ExecThread’s underlying value-proposition of bringing much-needed transparency & access to confidential exec-level jobs. Not only is ExecThread breaking down the $40-50 Billion executive search industry, but is doing it with inherent bias’ removed as well, and as a result is leveling the playing field.

Oh, and did I say that all member referrals are automatically granted access. So, let me know if you want in by sending me an email through the form on my website, or apply on your own at ExecThread.