How we work Executive Search & Recruitment

There has never been a greater demand for leadership and strategic vision. That is why South End Partners believes in being more than a consultant. We become part of your HR team.

We leverage the best AI and behaviour assessment tools in the industry to help you hire objectively and effectively, avoiding subjective (and costly) HR mistakes and mishires.

Our team focuses on understanding your specific business needs, we then design role profiles using behavioural insights to ensure a successful fit into your corporate culture. We provide a bespoke solution for every role we work on.

South End Partners has been trusted by hundreds of clients of all sizes and in all industries, from emerging start-ups to high growth global organizations, to source their next leader and help them understand how to motivate and maximize performance from their current teams.

It’s what differentiates our team and approach from other recruitment agencies and consultants. It’s what makes us a true hiring and HR partner for our clients.

Our Recruitment Process

An abstract graphic representing the data points and interconnections of the proprietary search and recruitment process to locate fitting executives.

We start with values

We start by listening so that we can thoroughly understand what drives your organization, your people and your HR & recruitment needs: What type of leader are you looking for? What are your corporate goals? What’s keeping your leaders awake at night? What do you want to cultivate or change about your culture?

We then create culture scorecards to make sure our candidates share your corporate values and will be successful in the role. By leveraging our proprietary assessment tools, we work with you to craft a profile of your ideal candidate, measuring four key cognitive and behavioural traits as guidelines.

We leverage our network + data

We typically spend 100+ hrs researching and screening candidates. We target top North American talent and market your organization. Our core team is based in Toronto but our recruiting network extends nationally from Halifax, Montreal to Calgary and Vancouver as well as major cities in the U.S.

We engage with our large network of local and national relationships to identify a diverse pool of candidates that meet your needs. We thoroughly assess all candidates to make sure they are in line with your profile, culture and desired experience.

We present leaders who drive results

We present a targeted shortlist with qualified data that includes: candidate overviews, resumes and testing so you have a comprehensive understanding of the candidate before the interview even begins.

Not every client has the opportunity to conduct thousands of interviews a year like we do. We use our deep interviewing expertise to work with our clients if needed to design optimal interview questions and scenarios so they are prepared to ask the right questions.

We validate our results

Our unique approach to references means clients actually receive meaningful insights from past employers. We probe with cognitive-based questions to understand how the candidate has performed under stress, how they learn, what drives them and key results they achieved so that we can further validate a successful hire. Plain and simple, we dig deeper!

HR Consulting

Our value does not end with a successful hire, we often partner with clients to help them optimize all aspects of their HR process.

This includes:

  • Enhancing interviewing techniques & training
  • Creating onboarding documents to make sure you can optimize your new employee’s talent faster
  • Cognitive and behavioural assessments for your current team to help boost performance and discover hidden gems
  • Compensation studies and program reviews
  • Organization design
  • Career & work architecture
  • People strategy & performance
  • Change management
  • Workforce transformation
  • Career transition & outplacement

We are recruitment leaders in your industry

Our team leverages their industry and business expertise to find the best leaders on the market in numerous sectors.

Our team leverages their industry and business expertise to find the best leaders on the market in numerous sectors.