Interview: Jen Sudduth of Sudduth Search

A Houston-based executive search pro on how the C-suite gets hired

I recently sat down with Jen Sudduth, who has over 20 years’ experience helping her clients identify and hire the best C-level talent.

I find people like Jen’s work fascinating, especially when it comes to helping middle-market and private-equity backed companies hire new CEOs. Even if you sit on a board or are a big-time investor, you’re probably going to be involved in just a few CEO hiring processes over your whole career. But Jen and her team at Houston-based Sudduth Search handle these transitions all the time.

That gives her a vantage on the process of C-level hiring that few others have. I was interested to pick her brain about what boards and hiring teams are looking for in CEO candidates, what candidates are looking for in opportunities, and what some of the pitfalls of this extremely high-stakes process are.

If you aspire to a CEO role or other C-level position, you’ll want to read what Jen has to say, including:

➡️ Why exec-level candidates need to stop abusing AI in resume-writing
➡️ The top traits boards and PE firms want in CEO hires
➡️ What middle-market and lower-middle-market CEOs can expect compensation-wise
➡️ What she expects candidates to bring to the table immediately
➡️ Traps that can derail an executive search on the client side

…and a lot more.

Take us back to when you were just finishing high school. Did you have a grand plan for your life?

I sometimes wonder if I should say this, but I come from five generations of Methodist ministers. I never once thought I would be in business. But I was a psychology major, and I ended up wanting to be in business. In a way, it was not too far off from being a minister. If you’re in the church, you know that a lot of ministers have a sixth sense when it comes to relationship skills. They’ve got to bring on great people and be good at change management as well. It’s really a kind of CEO role. So a lot of the traits that made my family very good ministers are what makes me a very good headhunter.

I actually identify with that. When my wife and I raised money for our first business, our first hire was a former pastor who did recruiting and HR. That skill set certainly transferred. Did you get straight into recruiting after getting your psychology degree?

I worked in technology first. I did marketing and then sold software for four or five years, and then 2000 hit. Everyone thought the world was going to end. I started asking “Is this the career I really want?” I didn’t love sales.

I was approached by four different recruiters, and I finally decided that headhunting made the most sense for me. It’s a form of sales, but it fit with my psychology degree. I started doing recruiting shortly after 2000 and I’ve been doing it ever since.

But in 2019, you decided to go out on your own and start your own firm. How did that happen?

The company I worked for had been bought twice and had become part of this very large company. I decided I didn’t love that. I’ve always had entrepreneurial roots and instincts, and I decided I wanted to do things my way.

In headhunting, so many areas can be gray ethically. You have to be purposeful about doing what’s right for the candidate and for the client. I wanted to make those decisions on my own and make them in a very purposeful way. I gave my previous employer a lot of notice, finished off all my searches, and started building a business plan.

Funny story, I showed the financial analysis part of the plan to my husband – he’s a finance person and I’m not. At first he said, “I don’t understand how your brain works.” I thought his next words would be something like “This is too risky. Don’t do it.” But he looked a little longer and came back and said, “I think you should quit tomorrow. This makes sense.”

What surprised you most, transitioning from working for somebody to running your own show?

The workload. Having everyone whispering in your ear wanting you to do something. Feeling like you have to do everything but resisting getting bogged down in details. I think it’s the same for many C-level executives. The tactical details are easy, but you can’t get bogged down in the easy stuff. You’ve got to stay focused on the direction that you want to go. You’ve got to spend your time in the right places.

I had to constantly refocus, because I was doing the job that previously three people had done. Within about three months, we were doing so well that we hired another person.

What are the biggest mistakes you see companies making when it comes to hiring executives?

The biggest one is the team not being aligned on what they want. One of the things I make mandatory is that anyone who has input on hiring must be in the room for the launch meeting.

Half the time, they will say, “No, no, trust us, we’re all aligned. We all agree what we need.” Well, then what happens? We’re 75% of the way through the search and we put candidates in front of their hiring team, and someone says, “Wait, no, I really wanted a sales-focused CEO” or “This person isn’t a cultural fit”—or whatever the case may be. Then we have to start over. It’s a lot of wasted time. So the biggest mistake is assuming your team is aligned because you had a couple of conversations.

What are the best candidates looking for in roles? What is good for the hiring company to know?

I think alignment again, but in a different way. A lot of what we do is private-equity backed, and I think a lot of candidates want to see alignment between the investors and the current executive team. It’s really important for these candidates to know, especially if they’re coming in to lead a PE-backed company, whether the PE firm hired the executive team, whether it’s expected they will be replaced, that kind of thing.

In PE situations, how much do candidates dig in to the realism of the “value-creation plan,” to use private equity lingo, and whether the targets are reasonable from where they’re starting? Because typically, when a company is getting a new CEO, something isn’t going well.

I think you hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly the CEO’s number-one concern when they assess whether the opportunity is a fit for them. They usually do it before they even talk to me. They assess the value-creation plan, the market opportunity, where the company fits in.

For experienced CEOs, that’s the top thing they’re looking at. They usually end up interviewing me more than I’m interviewing them, because they’re assessing the opportunity and whether they feel they can fix the problems and bring value.

How much do you get involved in the question of going out external or going internal to hire an executive?

For C-level hires, quite honestly I usually encourage them to assess the internal candidate or candidates before they hire me. So I’m not usually involved in that. Sometimes, with VP-level positions, we will add them to our candidate list, but most of the time that’s not something we’re asked to do.

What do you look for in candidates for CEO roles? Is there anything that you think predicts success?

The main thing is their understanding of the market. The CEO role we hire for are generally in private equity, middle market, and lower middle market, and those CEOs carry a broader load. They’ve got to be the commercialization expert, they’ve got to be the go-to-market expert, they need the operational skills to ensure that the team is executing on the vision. They’ve got to know that they’ll be doing a lot of that.

In your work with private-equity firms, is there anything in particular they look for in CEOs?

It’s similar to what any client wants in a CEO, but I will say that decisiveness is something they really want to see in candidates. As CEO, you’ve got to just make decisions. It may be wrong, but make a decision. I’ve heard that over and over. “We need a decision maker, not someone who wants to deliberate endlessly.”

How do you coach them before the interview about what the private equity firm is looking for or how to present themselves?

I shouldn’t have to, quite honestly. I give them all of the information the private equity firm or the chairman of the board has given me about what they think they can achieve with this company and what they’re aiming for. Private equity is notorious for pivoting. They’ll say they’re going in this direction because they think this product could be applicable to the chemical industry, then suddenly they’re going after oil and gas. The good ones can do that. They know they’ve got multiple markets they can take this product to. So the CEO has to be able to pivot and be flexible when the PE firm makes those changes.

But the number-one trait I look for is tenacity, being able to push things forward when things get difficult. When I see CEOs who jump ship when things got tough, that’s not a good indicator. Things are going to go wrong, things break when you’re growing fast. So the good CEOs, the ones who are transformational, can push things forward regardless. They figure out how to fix the plane while they’re flying it. Tenacity is really one of the most important traits for what I do.

Any other mistakes you see boards or PE firms making in looking for a CEO candidate?

Another mistake is wanting an up-and-comer because they think someone in their first CEO job is going to be more driven to prove themselves, that they’re going to have higher energy. I try to discourage that because you want the person who can see the problems before they come. You want someone who’s been there, done that, who knows what issues to look out for. You have to be able to foresee that. The up-and-comers don’t necessarily have that foresight. Fortunately, the middle-market private equity folks usually want the experienced CEO.

You deal with companies from $10 million in revenue to hundreds of millions. Are there breaks where you say, “Well, they’ve never run a $50 million company, so it’s not going to work?”

I do, and our clients do. If it’s a $100-million-plus company, my clients want somebody that’s run one that big, at least. And most of the time they want someone who’s run bigger, because private equity-backed companies want to grow fast. So I need someone who’s run a $250 million or $300 million company, because that’s the aspiration for the next two or three years. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an exception to that.

Let’s say I’ve got a $100 million company doing reasonably well and I’ve got to make a CEO switch. What kind of compensation package can I expect to have to offer to attract one of these experienced CEOs?

I know everyone hates the word “depends,” but it really depends on: Is this a high-margin company? Is this a low-margin company? Is the exit going to be in two years? Do you have a lot of problems? Is this a turnaround situation?

But for a $100 million company, you’re looking at a minimum of $350,000 base, double that for bonus, more than a point of equity. I’m probably on the low end with that, depending on the situation. If it’s a turnaround situation, be ready for more if you want somebody who’s going to turn it around. There may even be levers that say, “If you hit this KPI, we’re going to increase your comp to this.”

Everybody’s talking AI. How has that impacted recruiting, and how has it impacted your business directly?

The resumes! It’s driving me nuts because people are using AI to write their resumes and then they’re not reading them. I’ll go to bullet point #17 and say, “It says here that you did X, Y, and Z.” And sometimes they don’t even know what it’s referencing, because they didn’t write it! Don’t do that. If you use AI—and everybody uses it, or they should—fix it. Go in and read every word of what it wrote.

I think preparation is the number-one place where AI helps. For C-level, if you don’t use AI to prepare for your call with me, this job is not for you. You can get what you need for a basic interview from AI within 10 minutes. AI has raised the bar on preparation from the candidate standpoint. They should be able to find competitors of the company they’re interviewing with very quickly. If they don’t come to the table with that when we start talking, it really makes me question them. Six months ago, I had to educate them on everything because there really wasn’t a database they could access. Now there is.

Other than interviews, are most of companies using assessments or other methods to evaluate candidates?

Many do, and they all seem to use a different one. Frankly, a lot of the private equity firms do not. But if it’s a privately held entity where fit within the leadership team is absolutely critical, then yes. I just did a CFO role for a family office. He was insistent that the person brought to the table have a certain profile on his assessment because it fits within the leadership team. I wouldn’t take it that far in most cases, but we did find several people who fit what they wanted. And now that CFO is knocking it out of the park. I think if the client has a lot of faith in it, it’s important.

I assume you run pretty sophisticated background checking, both references that are given and references that aren’t given?

Absolutely. We do have an executive level background checking system that costs several thousand dollars. It goes into social media, looks at college records and gets all the transcripts. It’s pretty extensive. We don’t get that requested a lot—that’s more of a public-company thing. But we have done it and it’s pretty thorough.

Is there anything your client companies do that turns good candidates away?

A lot of times, the hiring team may not have done much hiring of CEOs and other C-level executives and they will treat those executives like mid-level management. They’ll try to put them through a hiring process that reflects their standard process for their company. I discourage that. I really don’t allow it.

Sometimes they will treat those executives like mid-level management. They’ll try to put them through a hiring process that reflects their standard process for their company.

At this level, the interview should be a back-and-forth conversation. It’s almost like interviewing both ways. The CEO should be fully aware of what the company is trying to accomplish. They should know where they fit into that and what they bring to the table. If there are gaps, then that’s the time for the hiring team to ask more pointed questions.

Yeah, this is a problem I’ve seen across the board. Most people don’t hire very many CEOs in their career, if any. So they may not fully understand what the CEO job requires and how to evaluate candidates against that.

Which is also why I discourage over-reliance on that kind of interviewing. A lot of times the client is like, “Well, I would like this VP and that VP to interview the CEO candidate.” I typically suggest instead that they select your CEO and then arrange lunches between the CEO and those VPs, but don’t give them decision power. That can really blow up a search. You don’t really necessarily want the direct reports choosing their CEO, because they can’t always determine who is the best fit for that CEO role. You can consider their opinions in the hiring decision, but you need to do so in a careful, purposeful way.