Search Consultant

About the role

Do you enjoy identifying, engaging, and evaluating talented professionals and helping connect them with meaningful career opportunities? Do you enjoy building relationships with executives and professionals, asking thoughtful questions, and understanding what motivates people? Are you highly organized, detail-oriented, and capable of managing multiple searches, candidate relationships, and competing priorities simultaneously?

As a key member of the Gilman Partners team, the Search Consultant will play an essential role in the successful execution of retained executive searches, with primary responsibility for candidate identification, engagement, assessment, and relationship management. Executive search is highly relational and consultative, but success also requires persistence, organization, sound judgment, and attention to detail. This position is based at the corporate office in Cincinnati, Ohio and requires onsite presence at least three days per week.

About the company

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

Responsibilities

• Partner with Executive Search Consultants, Directors, Partners and the research team to understand position requirements, develop targeted sourcing strategies, and identify the candidate profiles and organizations most likely to produce qualified talent.
• Identify and engage qualified candidates through personalized direct outreach, professional networks, referrals, research, and other sourcing strategies.
• Build lasting relationships with executives, candidates, and referral sources, maintaining connections that may lead to future search opportunities.
• Conduct initial candidate conversations and in-depth interviews to evaluate professional experience, leadership capabilities, career motivations, compensation expectations, and alignment with client needs.
• Prepare clear, accurate, and insightful candidate summaries that communicate relevant experience, qualifications, career motivations, potential concerns, and alignment with client requirements.
• Manage candidate communication throughout the search process, including interview preparation, scheduling, feedback, follow-up, and expectation management.
• Support reference checks, compensation discussions, offer processes, and other activities required to bring searches to successful completion.
• Manage recruiting activities across multiple searches simultaneously, maintaining accurate documentation, clear priorities, organized candidate pipelines, and consistent follow-through.
• Participate in client kickoff meetings, search updates, and candidate discussions, providing informed perspectives on candidate availability, market feedback, recruiting challenges, and potential adjustments to search strategy.
• Communicate proactively with search teams regarding candidate progress, potential challenges, market feedback, and recommended next steps.
• Contribute