History of the Executive Search Industry

Executive Search emerged about 60 years ago as a new way to pro-actively recruit senior managers and executives. The majority of its early practitioners came from management consulting or industry. Thanks to their specific business knowledge and client management experience, these consultants were able to understand and relate to the strategic goals of their clients. Quite often clients would hire these management consultants in an executive capacity to implement newly developed strategies or ask them to recommend appropriate senior executives to do so. Eventually, recommending appropriate executives became the exclusive focus of a small number of consultants who, by adding structured research to their own networking, became the pioneers of Executive Search.

Having seen the need for and logic behind such services, many management consulting firms established Executive Search Divisions. Other firms were established as independent companies. By the early 1960's Executive Search had become a clearly distinct branch of management consulting with high ethic and professional standards. New firms were being established by people coming from a variety of business sectors and/or the human resources discipline. In Russia, the first Executive Search companies were set up in the early 1990's following the arrival of numerous multinational companies in the market. Amrop was one of the first to establish itself, starting up operations in 1994.