When we started Fahren, we set out to create a leadership company. Our goal was to help companies compete and win during a time of rapid digital change. We knew there was a market gap we could fill: Interim roles for Director/VP level leaders in the Marketing, User Experience, Product Development, and Digital Analytics space. Our next step is to add another service offering: retained executive search to help our clients fill their digital leadership roles permanently. We think it’s a logical extension to our current offerings.
Over the course of the year that we’ve been building Fahren, we’ve helped our clients transform their strategies, their teams, their business results and, ultimately, their culture by connecting them with our transformational leaders for projects and interim roles. We know now that the right kind of leader in an interim role can be a real game-changer for organizations that need it.
If we do our job well, our clients will use the interim role to rethink, re-imagine and refocus key roles via our engagement. We change the direction of the role by bringing our perspective and experience to redesign the job profile so everyone on the leadership team is aligned on the functional skills, developmental experiences, leadership challenges the next leader will need to have.
To date, our value proposition to our clients has been focused on a few key things: a) we’re uniquely experienced digital leaders for critical roles and b) we help companies transform critical roles through our advice, experience, and recommendations.
Now, we’ve got another way for Fahren to offer another way to help companies transform: Find their /next/ leader via retained, executive searches. While there are already a lot of firms that provide executive recruiting and retained search, we think this is a really exciting space for us because we know we can be a better kind of partner.
One of our advantages is that we’ve actually done and led most of the roles we’ll be filling (UX, Digital Analytics, Marketing, Digital Product Leadership, Strategy & Innovation) on both the client-side and agency-side. You’d be surprised at how many recruiters have never done the jobs they’re trying to fill or never worked at the executive/director level. And, as a team, we’ve hired over 100 digital roles ourselves. So, we know what effective leadership looks like and we can sort out cruft in the resumes.
Beyond helping our clients, we also see this offering as another way to be valuable to the consultants and leaders in our network. We want to be able to help them find the work they love, in the right kind of organizations, on their own terms. By building an executive search practice at Fahren, we’re creating more ways to be helpful to the talented folks we meet every day who seek new ways to advance their careers.
Stay tuned for some exciting news on how we’re going to build this practice area!
