Why Search Difficulty Varies
Executive search difficulty is determined by the intersection of candidate supply, role demand, company attractiveness to candidates, location factors, and compensation competitiveness. A search for a commercially excellent VP of Sales in enterprise software in San Francisco is genuinely harder than it appears — because the demand from thousands of funded startups exceeds the supply of executives who have actually built and scaled enterprise sales functions. Understanding this before the search begins prevents timeline failures and client frustration.
The Rating Dimensions
Majhi Group's Search Difficulty Rating assesses five factors: candidate pool size (how many people have the specific experience this role requires?), market competition (how many other companies are searching for the same profile?), company attractiveness factors (stage, brand, compensation competitiveness, remote policy), role-specific complexity (how specific and rare is the required experience?), and timeline pressure (how much pressure is on the search timeline?). Each factor is rated and combined into an overall difficulty score that informs process design.
How Difficulty Affects Process Design
High-difficulty searches require different process design than standard searches. They require longer sourcing phases, more direct outreach to passive candidates, more intensive candidate engagement, stronger offer packages, and more careful stakeholder management throughout. The Search Difficulty Rating ensures that process design is calibrated to actual difficulty — preventing the underpowered search approach that most contingency firms apply to all searches regardless of difficulty.
Setting Realistic Timelines
One of the most common sources of client frustration in executive search is misaligned timeline expectations. Clients who expect a difficult search to close in six weeks when it realistically requires twelve are frustrated regardless of how well the search is executed. The Search Difficulty Rating produces a realistic timeline estimate before the search begins — so that client expectations are aligned to reality from day one.