By Scott Driggs, President and CEO, Driggs Search International
My longest client relationship started with a single search, and it needed to be more thorough than any I had run before.
The assignment was a technology leadership role for a company that had never worked with me. The leadership team wanted to see the market. Not a shortlist assembled in a week. The whole market. So I went and found it. I researched and contacted qualified technology leaders at competitors and at larger companies, and I built a slate I believed in.
The client ran an unusually thorough interview process. After all of it, they hired the person I had ranked first from the start. That leader performed well and stayed for many years.
I have thought about that search often, because it set the pattern for everything that followed. The company gave me trust, access, honest communication, and an exclusive retained commitment. I gave them full market coverage and a straight read on every candidate. That exchange became the foundation of a partnership that has lasted more than two decades.
Over those years, Driggs Search International has placed more than 65 people with this one client. The roles spanned operations, finance, marketing, sales, research and development, technology, human resources, and international leadership. Some were individual contributors. Many were directors, vice presidents, and executives. A number came from Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. During that same stretch, the client grew from hundreds of millions in revenue into a multibillion-dollar international business.
I want to be careful here. I did not grow that company. Its founder, its leadership team, its employees, its products, and its customers did that. My work, and the work of the people I placed, was one contribution inside a much larger story of strategy and execution. What I take from it is a set of lessons that only a long relationship with one exceptional organization teaches.
A Job Description Tells Only Part of the Story
Here is the first lesson. A job description tells you only part of what matters.
Early on, I recruited against the requirements on the page. Over time, I learned the things that never make it onto the page. I learned how individual executives thought and what they expected. I learned which traits predicted that someone would still be thriving five years later. I learned the difference between an impressive resume and a real fit. That knowledge does not come from a briefing call. It comes from years of watching who succeeded, who struggled, and why. The longer I worked with the company, the sharper my judgment became, because I was no longer guessing about the culture. I knew it.
For any leader choosing a search partner, that is the argument for continuity. The recruiter who knows your history, your leaders, and your standards will serve you better in year ten than any newcomer in year one. Treat search as a relationship, not a series of transactions, and the results compound.
Relocation Is a Family Decision
The second lesson took me longer to learn. Nearly every person I placed with this client had to relocate, and relocation is not a professional decision. It is a family decision.
I learned early that recruiting someone to relocate requires far more than presenting an attractive role. My job is to help a candidate and their family make an honest choice about uprooting their lives. That means talking about the things a job posting ignores. Where the children will go to school. What happens to a spouse’s career. What the community is like. Whether the company is stable enough to bet a family’s future on. I learned to explain the position, the leadership, the culture, and the quality of life with the same care, because a placement succeeds only if the whole family lands well. Even the right executive will struggle to stay when the move does not work for the family, no matter how good the job looks on paper.
The Best Placements Are Measured in Years
That connects to the third lesson, the one I care about most. The best placements are measured in years, not in accepted offers.
An accepted offer is the start of the work, not the finish. What matters is whether the person performs, fits, stays, and grows. With this client, a strong majority of the people I placed remained for years. Some built careers spanning decades. Many earned promotions, built teams, and took on far larger responsibilities than the roles they were hired into.
That did not happen by luck. It happened because the company was worth staying for. It offered an employee-focused culture with strong benefits and real investment in its people, led by a founder and senior team who hire for belief in the mission rather than for a paycheck. And it happened because we recruited for it. The candidates who lasted shared a pattern. They had a record of success and the humility to keep learning. They worked well with others. They took coaching. They wanted to contribute to something larger than their own compensation. I learned to weigh those traits as heavily as the ones on the requirements list.
Some of the credit for that belongs to a trusted internal recruiting leader I originally placed at the company years ago. He became one of the finest partners I have worked with. We told each other the truth, quickly and often. We held the same standard for candidate quality. He brought deep organizational knowledge, and I brought market reach, and neither of us cared much about who owned a given search. We cared whether the right person ended up in the seat. When internal and external recruiters work that way, as one team with one standard, the hiring gets better. When they compete, it suffers.
So, what do I take from more than twenty years with one client? Mostly a sense of responsibility.
When you recruit someone, you are not filling a slot. You are asking a person to bet their career on your judgment, and asking a family to bet their lives on it. When it works, someone builds a career, raises a family in a new place, and grows into more than they thought they were capable of. That is worth taking seriously. The resumes are the easy part. The responsibility is the real work, and after all these years it is the part I still think about most.