Permanent placements for the roles where the work, the person, and the relationship all need to compound over time. Contingent-fee, retained, and engaged-search models, calibrated to seniority and the rarity of the talent.
Direct hire is more expensive up front and slower to fill than contingent. It is also dramatically cheaper across the lifecycle for the right kind of role. The framing question is whether you want this person to stay.
Direct hire is a different discipline from contingent. The candidate evaluation is deeper, the closing process is longer, and the cost of getting it wrong is higher. We run direct hire as a separate practice, not as a side product.
Junior and mid-level roles run on contingent fee with TalentMatrix vetting; senior IC and director roles on engaged search with milestone payments; executive and rare-specialist roles on retained search with researcher-recruiter pairing, AI-assisted market mapping, and confidential passive outreach.
For senior roles, HOGAN personality assessments and 360-degree feedback are built into the evaluation. The candidate's resume tells you what they've done. These tools tell you how they operate under pressure, which is what most direct-hire failures are caused by.
We run reference checks properly: open-ended conversations with three to five people who worked alongside the candidate, probing the failure modes the role is sensitive to. One of the most predictive signals of whether a hire works out.
Direct-hire deals close on a different rhythm. Compensation, equity, start-date alignment, and counter-offer management are run by senior recruiters who've done it hundreds of times. The candidates we want, we close.
Direct-hire fees run as a percentage of first-year base salary, in line with industry norms, with a replacement guarantee on every placement. Exact terms are set per engagement, never a one-size-fits-all rate, but we track our replacement rates and share them in QBRs.
When you're hiring a CTO, CISO, or CFO, the role doesn't just fill a seat; it defines a strategy. We run those searches retained, confidential, and personally, with a senior partner accountable end-to-end, off-market candidate access, executive-level assessment, and the discretion the work requires.
Senior partners personally run executive searches end-to-end: intake, stakeholder calibration, slate, references. No handoff to associates.
Technology & Engineering executives (CTO, CIO, CISO, Chief Data Officer, VP Engineering) and Business Operations executives (CFO, COO, Chief Risk Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Audit Executive). The functions where we've already built network depth.
Most executives you'd want to hire aren't on the job market. We run discreet outreach, sometimes to candidates we've known for years, through channels that don't show up in applicant pools.
HOGAN, 360-degree, structured stakeholder calibration, and reference work beyond who-they-list. At executive stakes, the cost of skipping this is too high.
Milestone-based commercials, replacement guarantee structured for executive timelines, and onboarding partnership through the executive's first year.
We're deliberately specialized rather than generalist. We don't run CEO searches or board work. We run the functional executive roles where Thunderhawk's existing depth makes the search faster and the match better.
Start an executive search conversation →The right structure depends on role seniority, candidate scarcity, and how much skin in the game both sides need.
Fee paid on placement only. Best for junior to mid-level roles in well-supplied talent markets. Fast to start, low up-front commitment, but the search commitment from us is calibrated to the probability of placement.
Fee structured in milestones: engagement, shortlist delivery, placement. Best for senior individual contributor and director-level roles where the candidate scarcity warrants deeper search commitment.
Standard executive search structure: engagement fee up front, with milestones tied to deliverables. Best for executive roles, rare specialists, and confidential searches where exclusivity and depth of process are worth the investment.
A Fortune 500 live entertainment company needed senior finance leaders: Director of Finance, Controller, Director of Business Management Reporting. We screened for production accounting depth, multi-entity consolidation, and OneStream/Oracle Fusion fluency, with three layers of vetting before any name reached the client.
Read the case study →Compare Contingent, SOW, Managed Services, Direct Hire, and RPO side by side: what each is, when to use it, and how to choose. One page to forward to your team.
Tell us the role, the seniority, and the timeline. We'll be honest about whether contingent fee, engaged, or retained is the right fit, and we'll move on whichever you choose.