When Leadership Talent Is Scarce: Key HR Strategies in a Tight Market

By Eric Walczykowski, CEO, Bespoke Partners

September 10, 2025

Talent is a market like any other, with buyers and sellers.

Buyers are companies; sellers are prospective employees.

The law of supply and demand applies: when willing sellers are scarce, the market tightens, competition among buyers increases, and price (compensation) rises. That determines how easily you can find the talent you need at a compensation level that fits your budget.

So what do you do when the talent market gets tight?

A case study is playing out right now in private equity (PE). It offers lessons for HR leaders on finding the right executives when competition is fierce.

PE firms buy companies, improve them over a few years, and sell for a profit if all goes well.

The sector is huge. In the US, PE-backed companies directly employ about 13.3 million workers and support roughly 31–33 million jobs when you include supplier and consumer-spending effects. Nearly one in five US workers gets a paycheck linked to PE’s investments in our economy.

Leadership talent is essential to a profitable exit, so PE firms focus heavily on finding leaders who can execute growth and value-creation plans. Increasing scarcity of qualified leadership makes this much harder.

A bottleneck has developed because exits have been extremely low for an extended period. When an exit happens, senior executives typically become available for new assignments.

But US PE exits fell 25% in Q2 this year, according to PitchBook, amid economic uncertainty and tariff concerns. PitchBook analysts estimate PE firms hold an all-time-high inventory of more than 12,000 unsold US portfolio companies—a logjam caused by poor exit opportunities.

The exit problem means leadership churn isn’t happening. The most experienced executives are staying put, pursuing elusive exits, and are not available to lead the many companies now crowding PE portfolios.

The PE Leadership Bottleneck

As supply tightens, HR teams recruiting for PE face scarcity of qualified leadership.

It’s harder to find candidates with PE portfolio experience. Searches are longer and harder to close. When leaders are willing to consider new roles, compensation demands are much higher. Our latest data shows C-suite salary and bonus for software and SaaS executives is now consistently in the mid-$500,000 range—up about 25% for some roles over just a couple of years. That’s exactly what supply-and-demand dynamics predict: the “price” for a scarce resource rises.

Competition is fierce. Experienced leaders often field multiple offers simultaneously, especially seasoned CEOs and go-to-market executives in sales and marketing.

Fortunately, the same market rules suggest ways to mitigate tightness. Many of our clients use six recruiting strategies to ease constraints and improve their odds of hiring the leaders they need.

These apply well beyond the PE sector, and can be used by any HR professional hiring senior executives when those executives are scarce.

Impact on Leadership Recruiting

1) Make succession continuous, not episodic

Waiting until an immediate need arises locks you into that moment’s market conditions. Like all markets, the leadership market changes frequently. The most effective HR leaders run year-round succession programs that map and track potential needs and potential availability.

2) Expand the funnel with “step-ups”—and de-risk them

Hunting for C-suite “unicorns” with the exact resume narrows the pool and elongates searches. Consider VP-level “step-ups” who are ready for the C-suite. This can double or triple the candidate pool and reduce tight-market pressure. Our data shows step-ups achieve exits in PE-backed companies as often as seasoned C-suite counterparts as long as the new C-suite executives are vetted and supported properly with onboarding and mentorship or other support. The step-ups are hungry to prove themselves and will put in outsized effort.

3) Elevate HR as a strategic function

Traditional HR handles operations like payroll, benefits, and onboarding. But the most effective HR leaders elevate the function to be a true strategic partner. Because talent is mission-critical, HR and leadership needs belong in enterprise-level planning and decision-making. In PE, firms are adding full-time talent in operational advisory roles who help portfolio companies find and maximize impact from talent.

4) Get creative on compensation

As “market price” rises, recruiting qualified executives gets expensive. But talent isn’t a commodity with a single price. Use multiple levers—equity and options, milestone payouts, incentives tied to strategic success, and even remote work flexibility—to attract top leaders, sometimes at lower cash levels.

5) Streamline decision-making

When competition is intense, slow movers lose—both because candidates field other offers and because a slow process signals bureaucracy and a less-than-nimble culture. Top companies treat recruiting as a priority. Before engaging candidates, they align internally on the scorecard, references, compensation, interview cadence, and interview focus.

6) Work with external specialists

There’s a temptation to run searches in-house. But external search firms usually deliver better outcomes. They continually network with prospective candidates, giving you wider visibility. They track careers, know which roles will appeal and how to pitch them, and have real-time compensation data to guide negotiations and benchmark offers.

Six Strategies for a Tight Talent Market

Even in tight markets, some companies still land the best executives and set themselves up for success. The six strategies above are the tools they use to beat the competition for PE executive talent. You can apply them in any sector. The overarching strategy: run an efficient process, get creative, and broaden your market visibility to counteract scarcity of qualified talent.

Winning in the Tight Market

About Eric Walczykowski

Eric is the Chief Executive Officer of Bespoke Partners, a leading executive search firm for private equity portfolio companies.

Bespoke Partners delivers a scientific approach to search by leveraging proprietary tools and methodologies that lead to high impact executive teams that stay through the investment thesis 99% of the time.

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Leading the Async Revolution

An HR Leader’s Guide to Cultural Transformation

Jim Coughlin

Founder at Remotivated

How forward-thinking HR professionals are spearheading the shift to asynchronous work cultures and why your organization can’t afford to wait

HR leaders are often the unsung heroes of workplace transformation. While executives debate strategy and managers focus on execution, we’re the ones tasked with the delicate art of cultural evolution. Today, one of the most critical transformations facing our profession is guiding organizations toward asynchronous-first cultures – and the window for competitive advantage is rapidly closing.

At Remotivated, we help organizations navigating this transition, and we’ve found that the most successful transformations aren’t driven by technology adoptions or policy mandates. Rather, they’re led by HR professionals who understand that async-first culture is fundamentally about reimagining how humans collaborate at their best.

The HR Leader's Dilemma: When "Always On" Becomes Always Wrong

Here’s a scenario that probably sounds familiar: Your CEO proudly announces the company’s commitment to “flexible work,” which sounds great on the surface. However, your employee engagement scores are plummeting. Exit interviews reveal exhaustion, not freedom. The culprit? A culture that treats remote work like in-office work.
The problem isn’t where people work – it’s how we’re asking them to work. Most organizations have a digitized synchronous culture rather than designing an asynchronous culture. The difference is profound, and as HR leaders, we’re uniquely positioned to recognize and address it.

Why HR Must Champion Asynchronous Culture (Not Just Remote Policies)

1. Employee Well-being at Scale

Traditional metrics focus on what we can easily measure: response times, meeting attendance, seat time logged. But asynchronous culture optimizes for what actually matters: meaningful contribution, cognitive load management, and sustainable performance. HR leaders who champion async-first approaches report significant improvements in employee satisfaction scores and a drastic reduction in burnout indicators.

2. Inclusive Excellence by Design

Asynchronous work isn’t just accommodating – it’s optimizing for human diversity. Parents managing school pickup, neurodivergent team members who process information differently, introverts who contribute better in writing – async culture doesn’t just include these voices, it amplifies them. This isn’t about making exceptions; it’s about designing systems that bring out everyone’s best work.

3. Talent Access Multiplier

When your culture operates asynchronously, geography becomes irrelevant. But more importantly, lifestyle becomes irrelevant. Suddenly, your talent pool includes incredible people who previously couldn’t fit into rigid synchronous expectations. The organizations that figure this out first will have unprecedented access to top talent.

The Implementation Framework: Beyond Policy Changes

Phase 1: Audit Your Synchronous Assumptions

Before changing tools, change thinking. Conduct an honest assessment of which collaborative activities truly require real-time interaction. Most HR leaders are shocked to discover that 60-70% of meetings could be handled asynchronously with better outcomes.
Start by tracking these metrics for 30 days:

Meeting frequency and duration per team
Response time expectations (stated vs. cultural reality)
Decision-making speed for different process types
Employee energy levels throughout typical work weeks

Phase 2: Design Communication Hierarchies

Create clear guidelines for when to use alternate communication methods. This isn’t about restricting communication – it’s about making it intentional. Establish protocols that default to asynchronous methods while preserving space for synchronous connections when it adds genuine value.

Phase 3: Train Managers as Culture Champions

Middle management makes or breaks async transformation. They need specific skills: writing clear context-full messages, managing performance based on outcomes rather than activity, and creating psychological safety for team members who contribute differently.

Measuring Success: New Metrics for New Culture

Traditional HR metrics weren’t designed for asynchronous culture. Consider measuring items like:

Contribution Quality Index: Are people delivering their best work, or just responding quickly?
Deep Work Protection Rate: How much uninterrupted focus time are team members actually getting?
Decision Velocity: How quickly do decisions happen (not how quickly meetings get scheduled)?
Cultural Alignment Score: Do employee behaviors match stated async values?

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

The “Async Theater” Trap: Organizations that adopt async tools but maintain synchronous expectations. This creates the worst of both worlds – more platforms to monitor without the benefits of thoughtful, time-shifted communication.

The Documentation Excuse: Teams that resist async communication because they “don’t have time to document.” This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding – async communication becomes your documentation.

The Equity Illusion: Assuming that making async communication available makes it equitable. Without intentional culture design, async tools often amplify existing communication hierarchies rather than disrupting them.

The Competitive Reality

Organizations that successfully implement asynchronous-first cultures aren’t just improving employee satisfaction – they’re fundamentally outcompeting synchronous organizations. They make decisions faster, access better talent, and scale more efficiently.

The question isn’t whether your organization will eventually adopt asynchronous practices. The question is whether you’ll lead this transformation or be forced into it by competitive pressure.

Your Next Steps as an HR Leader

Assess Your Current State: How much of your organization’s collaboration actually requires real-time interaction?
Build Internal Champions: Identify managers who already work well asynchronously and learn from their practices.
Start Small, Think Big: Pilot async approaches with willing teams before organization-wide rollouts.
Invest in Skills Development: Async culture requires new competencies, particularly in written communication and outcome-based performance management.

The future belongs to organizations that can harness human potential without constraining human rhythms. As HR leaders, we have the opportunity, and responsibility, to design remote cultures where everyone can do their best work, on their own terms, together.

Want to dive deeper into implementing asynchronous practices? Explore this comprehensive guide to asynchronous work benefits for detailed strategies and tools that successful remote-first teams utilize to thrive.

Jim Coughlin is the Founder at Remotivated. Remotivated helps organizations build remote work cultures that actually work. Through their certification programs and consulting services, they help companies ensure sustainable, productive, and inclusive remote-first operations.