Frequently Asked Questions

Our fees are competitive with contingency recruiters. The only difference is we ask for a small deposit upfront to lock in our full research capability, detailed reporting, and systematized process that delivers a defined start date.

You're not paying more. You're ensuring your recruiter works FOR YOU, rather than FOR THE CANDIDATES.

The real cost difference isn't in fees—it's in hidden costs. Contingency recruiting typically costs companies $515,599 in lost revenue, manager time, and bad hire risk. Salisi Executive Search typically costs $63,477 in hidden costs. That's a savings of $452,122 per hire, with dramatically higher success rates.

All recruiters use the same tools: LinkedIn Recruiter, ZoomInfo, job boards. Using three contingency recruiters doesn't expand your talent pool—it just means three people spamming the same "Open to Work" candidates.

The passive, high-performing candidates you actually want aren't in that pool. They ignore InMails. They don't check job boards. They're not "exploring opportunities."

Think about it from the candidate's perspective: Which company felt more serious about you—the one with a dedicated headhunter, or the one that couldn't be bothered to invest in any recruiter?

When recruiters are racing each other, they only have time for candidates who are immediately available. With Salisi Executive Search as your retained partner, we can dedicate the time to make those 11,500 outreach touches to every single candidate you could possibly want—including all the ones who aren't reachable by anyone else.

Here's why we're so much faster than contingency:

1. We present candidates in week 2 (they're still scrambling in week 4)
2. We include the top performers who are not actively looking in our shortlist of three to four candidates (you spend four hours interviewing the best the market offers, not 40 hoping one or two might be close)
3. We coordinate everything (you're not playing calendar Tetris with six candidates)

A bad hire takes six months to discover and another six months to replace. That's a twelve-month mistake. We get you the right person in three weeks.

Every placement is guaranteed for twelve months, and the details of the guarantee are all clearly laid out in our agreement.

But here's the real answer: With 92% retention after eighteen months, this almost never happens. We've been doing this for twenty years. Our reputation depends on getting it right.

Three differences:

1. We're 35-50% cheaper. Traditional exec search firms charge high fees and want a significant proportion upfront. Our fees are in line with the contingency market, and we just ask for a small proportion as a deposit to enable us to provide all the additional research, reach-out and resourcing.
2. We're faster. They take three to four months. We average three weeks.
3. We're cyber-specialized. They're generalists. We only do cybersecurity GTM. We know what it takes to navigate a complex cybersecurity deal through the enterprise procurement process for an early stage vendor.

Bottom line: You get boutique-level quality at contingency-level pricing.