The New Rules of Executive Search and Why Most Companies Still Get It Wrong

Matt Mooney 0:00
And this is an industry that had no incentive to change right the tempo, no incentive to change the economics. And so we said, hey, we’re willing to go deep. It’s always going to have a human element. You’re never going to hire a CEO with an AI interview bot.

William Tincup 0:14
You raised sales by, you know, 22% okay, I need to know more about that exactly, exactly the board’s gonna be asking those questions. The more and more I think the deeper we go into AI generative, AI or agentic, or however you want to go with it, the more we go, the deeper we go, the more trust is going to come up.

Vicky Wilkens 0:38
I would like to be sitting here next year and saying that we helped search firms be way more efficient, we helped private equity and venture capital be way more efficient and have way better speed in the hiring executive perspective.

William Tincup 0:56
This is William Tincup of Work defined. We’re at HR Tech in Vegas, Marovi, and there’s a story to this. We have three executives from Marovi here with us today, so we’re gonna learn all kinds of good stuff. So why don’t we do the story first? Who wants to tell the Marovi story?

Matt Mooney 1:34
Oh, man, I’ll take it. So the three of us started this business back in the spring. Okay? And so Vicky is a marketing wizard, and we go through, we go through this elaborate naming process, and every name the three of us could come up with, it was already taken, oh yeah, or the URL was sold, or the meant something really obnoxious, and some obscure language. So, like, everything was off limits.

William Tincup 1:58
It’s, it’s a Latin word for…something you don’t want.

Vicky Wilkens 2:01
Urban Dictionary was definitely conferred.

William Tincup 2:03
I’ve got, I’ve got three posts on Urban Dictionary.

Matt Mooney 2:06
It was, it was a minefield. Finally, like, at a at a point of just complete surrender. Jin comes up one night, says, What if you take, like, ma out of Matt’s name, okay, Ro, out of Jin’s last name, got it? And then vi for Vicky. And we’re like, well, that’s the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard. And here we are. So we love it, but the name, the name was available. There were no all the social Yeah, we got pretty lucky that way.

Vicky Wilkens 2:31
So there’s a hotel somewhere in Italy that’s, yeah, we thought it sounded sort of like a posh car.

William Tincup 2:37
It does actually sound like that.

Matt Mooney 2:39
My wife hates this because she thought it sounded like a weight loss drug, like a GLP.

William Tincup 2:45
So it’s just one shot a week with Marovi, yeah, and you will lose at least 10 pounds a month.

Matt Mooney 2:50
Exactly.

Vicky Wilkens 2:52
There is efficiency in it.

Matt Mooney 2:54
Absolutely. That’s the goal.

William Tincup 2:55
That isn’t a bad bit to do. Like a commercial, yeah? And just do it with all the things a little like a little spoof. That’s that’s kind of a fun bit.

Vicky Wilkens 3:04
Our world is our oyster, for sure, on it.

William Tincup 3:05
Well, I also think, now that there’s a hotel in Italy, I think that’s a that sounds like a retreat to me.

Matt Mooney 3:11
It does.

William Tincup 3:12
We got to go.

Vicky Wilkens 3:13
It’s a good call.

Matt Mooney 3:14
Go there. Find your executive team. Lose weight.

Vicky Wilkens 3:17
Next podcast, Marovi at the Marovi Boutique Hotel.

William Tincup 3:20
So awesome. Why don’t we do introduction? So won’t you start first? Yeah, tell us a little bit about what you do.

Jin Ro 3:26
My name is Jin Ro. I’m the, essentially the head of product and development for the three of us. And my background, Princeton undergrad with architecture, which led to Accenture and McKesson and Seal Software,

William Tincup 3:43
There’s no humble brags in there.

Jin Ro 3:45
It’s all about connecting the problem and the solution, and oftentimes technology and data happens to be at the center of it. So really, I approach it from solution first and then if it if technology and data is an important aspect of it. Great. We’ll use it, and it’s one of the main things that we focus on, especially with AI. It’s not something that we run to but if it’s a part of the overall solution, great.

William Tincup 4:14
You’re not trying to force it.

Jin Ro 4:15
We’re focused on the end solution, and we start from there.

William Tincup 4:19
So I’ve been on all of the Ivy League campuses in a former life, doing former things. Princeton was far better, personable, like I went to the museum, did the tour, you know, talked to people, went to a couple bars, did the bit, and like, people were nice. I wouldn’t say the I’m not even say the other names, but like, there wasn’t the entitlement in the air, like I could actually just hang out with people with Princeton at a bar. It was no big deal.

Jin Ro 4:53
That’s great. And we actually, we’re actually middle of a town, so, we actually hang out with townies.

William Tincup 4:59
That’s right.

William Tincup 5:01
It’s, yeah, it’s a great atmosphere.

William Tincup 5:03
I couldn’t deal with the weather. But other than that, genius, alrighty.

Vicky Wilkens 5:08
I’m Vicky Wilkens from Marovi. I’m co founder, and I’m on the marketing go to market and branding side of the house. I come from consumer sports, technology, marketing backgrounds..

William Tincup 5:21
Consumer marketing.

Vicky Wilkens 5:22
Yeah, Weather Channel, Mizuno, I’ve been around so you started in TV back in the day.

William Tincup 5:30
Oh, my god.

Vicky Wilkens 5:30
Yeah. Turner Sports.

William Tincup 5:32
That’s cool. You’re in Atlanta?

Vicky Wilkens 5:33
Yeah

William Tincup 5:34
Yeah. So you’ll be disappointed, generally speaking, with the marketing of these folks in here because they suck, and they’re not, because they’re not consumer grade, because it’s B2B and it’s so it’s conservative, it’s dry, doesn’t have, like, a personality.

Vicky Wilkens 5:55
I feel like there’s been to give them credit. I feel like there’s been more of a merge where, you know, I mean, I’ve come from the B2C side, now I moved over. Matt recruited me over to a firm called ON Partners, which is an executive search firm, which is where we all came from, right before we started Marovi. And I was like, oh, B2B, and it’s not even B2B, it’s professional services.

William Tincup 5:55
Oh, do you slash this way or this way.

Vicky Wilkens 6:08
And I was like, the bars is gonna be low on the marketing. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised that, like, I just feel like marketing, there’s such a blend now between and some of these booths are awesome. That bridge over there, I was like, I like that one.

William Tincup 6:08
That one could be at a consumer trade show.

Vicky Wilkens 6:08
It could that was pretty cool.

William Tincup 6:08
A lot of the other ones, they play the safeguard because they think, ironically, they think that HR and recruiting, they think they’re conservative. And like, there was a company years ago called Verve, and their marketer was a consumer marketer, and it was all like it looked like whiskey and tobacco ads.

Vicky Wilkens 6:08
I know exactly what you’re talking about, yeah.

Vicky Wilkens 6:08
And it’s like, it was memorable, because they’re like, yeah, they might have to be conservative at work, but they’re not conservative.

Vicky Wilkens 6:19
You know what the difference too is, it’s the design, the creativity of it, right, right? And I just think there’s so many different ways to be creative now, but, like, there’s something beautiful about the creativity and design and some, like, some of those really cool brands. So I mean, that’s what we’re doing with Marovi since Matt already called me a marketing wizard. So, you know,

William Tincup 7:25
Put on a hat do the whole wizardry. Get a wand. Do the whole bit. All right.

Matt Mooney 7:31
Matt Mooney, I’m co founder at Marovi, and so Jin’s the tech and product wizard, Vicky’s the go to market wizard, and I’m just the old random search guy.

William Tincup 7:41
You’re not, you’re not a wizard.

Matt Mooney 7:42
I’m not, I’m not quite a wizard level yet.

William Tincup 7:44
So this is all the Dungeons and Dragons play, yeah?

Matt Mooney 7:48
And so this is year 33 in retained executive search. For me, it’s all I’ve ever done. I started, like, as an intern coming out of undergrad.

William Tincup 7:56
That was headhunter days.

Matt Mooney 7:58
Yeah, that was like, absolutely. And I love it. It’s an amazing profession. I think collectively, the three of us looked at the landscape. These two were at HR Tech last year. We were trying to find solutions that worked for us, right?

William Tincup 8:11
Nothing built nothing’s built for y’all.

Matt Mooney 8:13
No. Who has come up with something really impactful, disruptive and innovative for the retained executive search

William Tincup 8:19
in the last 20 years…

Matt Mooney 8:20
ever…

William Tincup 8:21
…never. It was one blue, blue, something that was for, it was an ATS for executive search, yeah. And it was horrible.

Matt Mooney 8:29
And so I think, you know, we looked at it, and this is an industry that had no incentive to change right the tempo, no incentive to change the economics. And so we said, hey, we’re willing to go try it. We’re going to go disrupt. We think there’s a chance to truly innovate, inject the right levels of technology. It’s always going to have a human element.

William Tincup 8:49
Has to

Matt Mooney 8:49
You’re never going to hire a CEO with an AI interview bot.

William Tincup 8:53
No, no.

Matt Mooney 8:53
But there’s a way to streamline and accelerate that first third of the search process.

William Tincup 8:58
So much of it is research and background and all of this stuff.

Matt Mooney 9:01
Of information that’s known that the information is out there, you can compile it and put it together the right way. Jin can. So…

William Tincup 9:08
You pull those things together, and then you let the human be the human, and especially if you have assessments, and some of the other things that are really important to have in there, you’ve already screened, you’ve already got the identity, you’ve already done all that stuff, and it’s like, okay, this is the opportunity.

Vicky Wilkens 9:24
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

William Tincup 9:25
Do you want to do this opportunity?

Matt Mooney 9:26
Right?

William Tincup 9:27
Great. Let’s talk. Keep talking if you don’t. Okay, great.

Vicky Wilkens 9:30
Yeah, so we, we’re debuting here. We left our cushy executive search firm jobs.

William Tincup 9:36
Bless you. I was making 600,000 and now I don’t have a paycheck or benefits.

Vicky Wilkens 9:43
We’re self funded. And I mean, the whole idea is to, you know, we’re not trying to replace expertise. We’re trying to apply it at scale, trying to take the way Matt does really, really great executive search research and assessment. And we’re trying to essentially compress that into minutes instead of weeks, and then allow you to really do the hard, important stuff after that, which is the assessment part of it.

William Tincup 10:10
You know, it could be the right person, but at the wrong time, so you can get down to the board level, and it’s just like, there’s not a match that happens in all kinds of recruiting, but the stakes are higher the higher you go up in the organization, because one bad executive take your entire company. Whereas, if it’s a cart, the you know, carts person at a Walmart, they’re they’re not going to do that much. I was a carts guy, so they’re not going to do that much damage. Whatever they do, it’s not going to impact the stock price. So the technology itself, tell us a little bit more about the tech, because you’re going into established executive search firms, and so whatever they’re using now note cards or otherwise, whatever they’re using, there’s a displacement of the of that. And then you got to use the system.

Jin Ro 11:09
The main thing was that, again, we said, you know, you start from the solution and sort of work backwards. The main thing that we were trying to do is emulate how Matt assesses candidates, right? So in in the just a few years ago, Matt and any of the other recruiting folks were looking for candidates. They try to grab as many different tools as they can, LinkedIn and others and you’re doing keyword searches and Boolean searches. You get a list of candidates, and you have, you really still don’t know why they’re up. You have to go through and read through and research each one of them, validate that their experience was recent, and that this person worked in the right company type last year, not 20 years ago. And so all of that research and looking at multiple tools, cross referencing, knowing that the company that had the equity event. You know, two jobs ago, he was there, and he was a leader and a relevant contributor of that event. Those are things that he would do to make sure that the candidate was the right candidate.

William Tincup 12:12
That’s the, what I’ve called in the is, historically, the breadth of depth, like a Java developer might be, might be a and this is outside of Yale’s ballpark, but they might have been a Java developer for 15 years, but were they doing one Java development project and deep, or did they do was it wide? And to be able to understand that for executives like, Okay, you said you raised sales by, you know, 22% okay, I need to know more about that.

Jin Ro 12:42
What did you do to get there? What were the strategies that you applied?

Jin Ro 12:42
Were you just in the room?

Jin Ro 12:47
Exactly. Did you do it consistently, year over year, multiple jobs? Do you have a track record of success. And equity events along your way? So these are all things that Matt would be able to notice.

William Tincup 12:59
…got to know, because the company’s paying you to know that.

Jin Ro 13:02
Absolutely.

William Tincup 13:03
They’re paying, that’s the bit.

Matt Mooney 13:05
A lot of money they’re paying 1/3 of the first year’s estimated total cash comp. That’s a big number.

William Tincup 13:09
That’s a number. Yeah, yeah. This is also time saving with the efficiency side. And you said, the minutes, seconds, etc. There’s the time that historically, they just spend, they’re doing good work. It does. There’s nothing negative to it. It’s just it takes time.

Vicky Wilkens 13:10
Yeah, and you’re, when you really look at it, executive hiring, it’s, it’s supposed to be a very in depth process, right? There’s a lot of context, because it’s a high risk situation. But at the same time, yeah, the same time you, when you really look at it, like 1990 searches took 100 plus days. 2025, searches take 100 plus days. And doesn’t matter what search firm says, whatever the timeline, that’s really that’s the reality.

William Tincup 13:57
Because of all the research that has to go in.

Vicky Wilkens 13:59
Yeah, and then when you think of the labor that goes into that, right? So whether you’re an enterprise, you know client who has a an executive Talent Team in-house, or you are a search firm and you have multiple researchers. So there’s a labor aspect to it. So our goal isn’t really necessarily, hey, speed, speed, speed, for speed’s sake…

William Tincup 14:19
No it’s gotta be quality.

Vicky Wilkens 14:22
And also, there’s a lot of companies who can’t they can’t use executive search firms around because they can’t afford it.

William Tincup 14:29
That’s right.

Vicky Wilkens 14:29
So how do you democratize the expertise of Matt in a way where smaller to mid sized companies can actually use Marovi as a tool, get the value and the depth and the context, and then take the process, once we have the prospects we really, are really interested in, and then go from there in terms of interviewing.

William Tincup 14:46
Right, right? So do we do any search anymore?

Matt Mooney 14:51
Yes, we do. We do, yeah.

William Tincup 14:53
a little bit of search

Matt Mooney 14:53
a little bit of search, because we think a it’s a great way to evangelize that story out in the market.

William Tincup 14:59
Okay, so we keep your hands in the dirt, so to speak.

Matt Mooney 15:02
Stay active in the market. But also, we have clients where we’re doing searches for them, but then they also get exposure, and they’re using the software for their own activities internally as well. So we like that. And I think, you know, I want to stay active in the market. We want to continue to have kind of the right strategic searches and expand, you know, the client relationship, but it’s a great way to do that.

William Tincup 15:22
I love that. I think the thing identity verification, fraud that comes along with it, Ryan and I were at iSolved an event, and one of the executives we interviewed was the fraud the chief executive of fraud prevention, or whatever the bit was, and the stuff he dropped on us coming out of North Korea, we’re like, what he’s like? Yeah, they’ll just because they if they have your face, then they can make up like this. They have your voice. You could be on a Zoom call. Brad’s Brad. Done. Brad’s not Brad.

Matt Mooney 15:58
It’s scary.

William Tincup 15:59
Oh my god.

Matt Mooney 16:01
I got an email from somebody like a year ago saying, Hey, by the way, on X and LinkedIn, your face is the profile for this head of some Irish but I guess I look like standard Irish dude out of central casting and but, like, they use my face as this fake persona you talked about for some Bank of Ireland.

William Tincup 16:21
Well, that’s, that’s something, I mean, as you do the vetting, it’s the another level, like ID me, or whatever. It’s like, you got to get to the heart of, is this person that we’re talking to? We’ve got the skills, and then, you know, we got all that, the stuff. But is this person this person? Because that’s going to be a thing that the board is going to care more about in the future is okay at the end of the day, I got it. We like it. Is that person that person?

Matt Mooney 16:47
And I think that’s where I think our world, at the executive search level, there’s always going to be that need for the human side as well. Oh, it’s the technology that you know absolutely is going to validate this person is real. And then my ability to call six people who’ve worked with them over the last decade and verify the performance, the behaviors, the culture, the leadership style, that’s what’s so good. I don’t know that you’ll ever get away from that.

William Tincup 17:12
Now there’s fraud in staffing. Historically, go all the way back to the beginning of staffing. There’s always been fraud. It’s just because you’re playing with live ammunition. I’m from Texas, so I can say this.

Vicky Wilkens 17:25
So are we

William Tincup 17:25
from Texas?

Vicky Wilkens 17:26
Houston, H town

William Tincup 17:27
Arlington, Texas.

Matt Mooney 17:30
There we go.

William Tincup 17:31
So I live in, I live there, and we have a lake house in Belton, Central Texas, nice. So anyhow, I can say live ammunition.

Vicky Wilkens 17:39
Yep, you’re allowed.

William Tincup 17:41
Yeah, but y’all are literally playing with live ammunition at the executive search level.

Matt Mooney 17:45
Absolutely, and there are, there are scary things. You know, we uncover things in degree verification, in background checks. Oh, by the way, you forgot to tell us, you know, you didn’t grab you didn’t actually graduate from Harvard.

William Tincup 17:57
Or, I love the bit and LinkedIn, where they just, they just list the the the university and some years. But I don’t list anything else. It’s like, Did you attend? You’re in the zip code, okay, no, did you graduate?

Matt Mooney 18:13
Took a weekend course?

William Tincup 18:15
And that drives me crazy. Somebody will put Stanford, and it’s like, you dig into it’s like, yeah, they were there for three days.

Vicky Wilkens 18:23
Biggest pet peeve.

Matt Mooney 18:26
In fairness, they technically went to Stanford for the weekend. They were there.

William Tincup 18:32
Yeah, they stayed at a really nice hotel.

Matt Mooney 18:33
Absolutely.

Vicky Wilkens 18:34
Yeah, I’d say one thing that helps us, I know it totally is helps us at the executive level, is when we’re talking about board members, CEO C suite. Most of them have very public profiles. They have tons of press releases written about them. Their bio is written in 15 different ways, because they’ve been in events and conferences. So if there is a little, I think a little less does help of that?

William Tincup 18:55
Yeah, it does help, unless you’re Irish.

Jin Ro 18:57
And one of the biggest prevention against fraudulent data, is to have as much and as integrated as cross linked as possible. So if you have opinions of Matt from multiple sources, we know that, And we have attributes from Matt where he’s posting on multiple sites, and we know that he’s the actual voice of these trends and information that are coming out. And we have his academic information from his colleagues and people that he went to school with, all of these different sets of information allow us to really trust that a little bit more, right? And that’s one of the core bases for our data model. It’s really flexible in that we’re able to take in both structured and unstructured data on an ongoing basis.

William Tincup 19:41
Nice.

Jin Ro 19:42
So we don’t have to just grab the data that we want today. We can just continue to add to Matt’s document. Is something that we’re going to be able to reference back at any time.

William Tincup 19:52
It’d be interesting to plot to understand the career trajectory. You know, they’re PNG. Then they left PNG, then they went over to MTV or whatever, and like, map their experience and kind of understand in context from other people, understand kind of who they were. Like, nobody was the same at 22 as they are or whatever. It changes. Yeah, potentially. Know that. All right, last question, we’re here next year. What are we talking about?

Vicky Wilkens 20:22
That’s a good question.

Matt Mooney 20:24
That’s why he’s the host.

Jin Ro 20:26
I have one from a technology So one of the things that I think we’re gonna see because, you know, AI is everywhere, right? There’s already AI fatigue, the I think one of the biggest things about AI, the trust factor is so critical. You know, I, I’ve so many times turned off a video because, ah, that’s AI generated. Turned it off. Moved on. It saw a picture. Ah, generated. Move on. Even in our, our case, we need to make sure that everything that we put out about a person, it is credible. It’s backed up by fact and proof, and we’re showing it, we’re detailing it.

William Tincup 21:08
Right. That’s the product.

Jin Ro 21:10
So it’s a critical element of using and leveraging AI. So I think the trust and security element around AI is really going to shake out. I think it’s going to be something that, you know, we will really be able to trust it more.

William Tincup 21:25
Well, that’s the board. The board’s going to be asking those questions. The more and more, I think the deeper we go, into AI generative or agentic, or however you want to go with it, the more we go, the deeper we go, the more trust is going to come up.

Jin Ro 21:39
It’s going to be required, and you’re going to have to be able to prove it back it up and have something differentiating to really make that, you know, part of the fabric of your technology solution and your and your product and your process.

Jin Ro 21:52
I think that helps executive search firms. Because it’s just like, whatever the thing looks like, a dossier, whatever the bit is. It’s like, verified, verified, verified, verified.

Vicky Wilkens 22:01
Yeah, I want to say I would like to be sitting here next year and saying that we helped search firms be way more efficient. We helped private equity and venture capital be way more efficient and have way better speed in the hiring executive perspective. We helped the companies that are smaller or mid size actually get the value of executive hiring, executive search, without having to to shell the big dollars for it.

William Tincup 22:30
As you said earlier, you’re not shaving off with efficiency and speed. You’re not shaving off quality. Quality is, that’s the that’s tip of the spear. We got to have quality, especially when you all do speed, is one of the things that the industry has never actually really focused on. Yeah, no, so Matt, do you have anything?

Matt Mooney 22:50
Look I think, yeah. I think Jin touched on it. I think, you know, we’ll see AI and all these new technologies become part of the fabric in 2026 but it’s going to be more foundational. It’s not going to be big, glitzy, sexy, Game Changing up. It’s going to be mundane things that we do well, you know, accelerating processes, adding more information, adding more validity to things. But it’s going to be kind of just like all emerging technologies. It’s going to be kind of slow, solid, foundational stuff that doesn’t like, blow your socks off, but you look up a couple years later, it’s like, okay, this is everywhere, and it’s impactful and it works.

William Tincup 23:24
Well, I look forward… Yes, and.. improv. So I look forward to a day of coming to HR tech and not talking about AI.

Vicky Wilkens 23:34
I can imagine.

William Tincup 23:35
It’s just, it’s ubiquitous. It’s just how things go.

Matt Mooney 23:39
Like we talked we talked about the internet, we don’t talk about electricity, no, we don’t talk about cloud, we don’t talk about wireless, right? It’s just it is, it’s, it is.

Jin Ro 23:48
We don’t see digital everything.

William Tincup 23:50
Oh my god, it’s digital. It’s software that oes through the internet.

Vicky Wilkens 23:53
That was my favorite in marketing. Digital marketing, digital marketing vs omni channel marketing.

William Tincup 23:58
That didn’t age well, oh no, it didn’t age well. You all been wonderful.

Matt Mooney 24:04
Thanks for having us.

William Tincup 24:05
Thank you very much for coming on the show and wrap.