Executive Search Consultant

About the role

Are you energized by the opportunity to independently lead executive searches from initial client conversations through successful placement? Do you enjoy evaluating senior-level talent and have the judgment to look beyond credentials and polished presentations? Do you naturally cultivate professional relationships, recognize business opportunities, and maintain connections even when there isn't an immediate need?

This position is at the corporate office in Cincinnati, Ohio and onsite at least three days per week.

About Gilman Partners

For more than 45 years, Gilman Partners has helped organizations build stronger leadership teams through retained executive search and leadership development. Based in Cincinnati and deeply connected to the regional business community, we have built our reputation through long-term relationships, a disciplined search process, and an unwavering commitment to integrity, candor, and sound judgment. With a team of approximately twenty professionals and more than one hundred searches successfully completed each year, we offer the rigor clients expect from a retained executive search firm with the collaboration, accessibility, and entrepreneurial spirit of a smaller organization.

We take the time to understand each client's business, culture, leadership team, challenges, and opportunities before determining what success in a role truly looks like. Our consultants and research team then work closely together to identify, engage, assess, and attract the right leadership talent.

Our culture is low ego and high accountability. Consultants have meaningful autonomy and ownership, but no one operates in a silo. We share information, relationships, candidates, ideas, and credit; follow through on commitments; communicate directly; and help one another succeed. We value colleagues who are curious enough to ask questions, confident enough to offer a point of view, and humble enough to acknowledge what they do not know.

For someone joining Gilman Partners, that means becoming part of a firm where individual contribution, relationships, quality of work, living our core values matter and where success is built together.

Responsibilities

• Executive Search Delivery
  • Lead retained executive searches from kickoff through successful placement.
  • Partner closely with the research team to develop targeted search strategies, identify and engage executive talent, and build strong candidate pipelines.
  • Conduct in-depth candidate interviews, assess leadership capabilities and organizational fit, distinguish substance from polish, synthesize findings, and present candidates to clients with clarity and credibility.
  • Manage the full client and candidate process, including interview coordination, preparation, feedback, communication, expectation management, and maintaining search momentum.
  • Facilitate compensation discussions, references, offer strategy, negotiations, and successful placements while ensuring a positive client and candidate experience.
  • Manage multiple searches simultaneously, maintaining disciplined processes, accurate documentation, clear priorities, and consistent follow-through.
• Client Relationships & Executive Advisory
  • Serve as the primary relationship manager and trusted advisor for assigned clients, building long-term partnerships with CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, board members, and other senior executives.
  • Lead client discovery and kickoff conversations to understand organizational strategy, culture, leadership needs, business challenges, and the characteristics required for success.
  • Provide candid, consultative guidance on talent availability, compensation, candidate quality, market conditions, and search strategies, including challenging client expectations when appropriate.
• Business Development & Relationship Building
  • Develop new search opportunities by intentionally building and maintaining relationships with prospective clients, executives, and referral sources through networking, introductions, community involvement, and consistent follow-up.
  • Independently pursue business development opportunities, including initiating prospect conversations, leading meetings, developing proposals, and converting relationships into new retained