Ownership matters too. Founder-led and growth businesses, VC-backed, private equity-backed and AIM-listed companies can employ people with identical job titles while expecting very different things from them.

A CFO provides a good example. A founder-led business recruiting its first CFO may need somebody capable of introducing greater financial discipline, building the team and giving the founder more confidence in forecasting without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. A VC-backed company approaching another funding round could place much greater emphasis on investor relationships, fundraising, modelling and the ability to communicate a financial story. A private equity-backed CFO may encounter debt, acquisitions and a defined value-creation plan, while an AIM-listed CFO operates with the additional requirements associated with public markets.

All four businesses are recruiting a CFO. They are not necessarily searching for the same person.

The search firm should therefore be able to explain how the candidate profile changes according to the stage, ownership and future plans of the business rather than treating "growth company experience" as a single category.

This is one of the most useful tests when comparing executive search firms.

Scaleups sometimes begin searches with a title before fully understanding the problem they need the appointment to solve. Recruiting a CFO because businesses of a similar size tend to have one is not necessarily a strong basis for a search. Neither is appointing a COO simply because the founder feels overwhelmed.

A founder struggling with operational decisions might conclude that they need a COO when a strong Chief of Staff could create the capacity they actually require. A company considering its first CFO may discover that an experienced Finance Director supported by a strong Financial Controller is the more appropriate structure. Elsewhere, a business looking for a Sales Director may have reached the stage where responsibility for sales, marketing and customer success requires broader revenue leadership.

Scaleups are still designing their leadership structures, which means job titles cannot always be taken at face value.

An effective search partner should be prepared to explore these questions before taking the role to market. Agreeing with every requirement on a specification is easy; determining which requirements will genuinely predict success is considerably more useful.

Once the requirement is clear, the search firm needs to know how to assess genuinely relevant scaleup experience.

Businesses understandably like candidates who have worked for larger, successful organisations. The assumption is that somebody who has already operated at the scale the company hopes to reach will know how to get there.

Sometimes that is exactly right. On other occasions, it confuses experience of working within a large organisation with experience of building one.

Imagine a scaleup with £20 million of revenue planning to reach £60 million. A candidate currently running a function within a £500 million company may appear substantially more experienced than somebody whose previous business grew from £15 million to £80 million. The first candidate has operated at greater scale; the second may have considerably more relevant experience of the journey.

Good assessment should therefore concentrate on transitions. What did the organisation look like when the executive arrived? What did it look like when they left? What did they personally build or change?

If a CFO worked for a company that grew from £20 million to £100 million, did they build the finance function or inherit it? If a commercial executive doubled revenue, did they recruit the team, develop the go-to-market strategy and establish the processes behind that growth, or were those foundations already present?

The answers matter more than the size of the organisation printed on the candidate's CV.

Executive recruitment into a scaleup cannot be separated entirely from ownership.

VC-backed companies may be investing ahead of revenue and building infrastructure for future scale. Private equity-backed businesses may be recruiting against a defined investment thesis involving acquisitions, margin improvement, international expansion or operational change. AIM-listed businesses combine commercial growth with public-market governance and reporting requirements.

Founder-led businesses introduce another dynamic because incoming executives may need to establish genuine authority without disrupting the qualities that made the founder successful.

One of the most important questions a prospective senior executive will often ask is how much authority they will genuinely have. A founder may sincerely want to delegate while finding the reality considerably harder once somebody arrives.

Recruiting an experienced CFO, COO or commercial leader without changing decision-making around them can create frustration on both sides.

A search firm familiar with founder-led scaleups should explore this before the appointment. What does the founder intend to stop doing? Which decisions will belong to the new executive? How will disagreements be resolved? Where does the board expect greater structure, and where does it want the entrepreneurial culture protected?

Investor-backed companies create their own questions. Investors frequently take a close interest in appointments capable of influencing execution, governance and enterprise value. We look more closely at this in Why Investors Often Recommend Executive Search.

Access to candidates should be another important consideration when comparing executive search firms for scaleups.

Senior recruitment cannot depend entirely upon executives who are actively looking for jobs. Many of the strongest CFOs, COOs, Sales Directors, Chief Revenue Officers, Marketing Directors and other functional leaders are already doing interesting work elsewhere and may have little reason to respond to an advertisement.

That becomes particularly important when the brief is specific.

There may be a substantial population of CFOs in the UK, but considerably fewer who have personally raised institutional capital, built finance functions through rapid growth, worked successfully with founder-led management teams and want to join a business at the particular stage and remuneration level being offered.

A credible executive search process should therefore include market mapping and direct approaches to relevant individuals rather than relying primarily on applications.

The search should also extend beyond people who currently hold the exact title. A Finance Director may be ready for their first CFO appointment. A divisional Managing Director might have the operational and commercial experience required for a COO role. An experienced functional leader could be capable of stepping into the C-suite for the first time.

Scaleups that insist every candidate has already held precisely the same role can sometimes exclude the people with the greatest capacity to grow alongside the business.

Finding the right executive is only part of the challenge. They also need to want the job.

Scaleups are not always able or willing to compete with the cash compensation available within larger organisations. The overall proposition therefore matters. Equity, strategic influence, access to the board, the opportunity to build a function and the possibility of participating in substantial future value creation can all make a role attractive.

The recruiter needs to understand that proposition well enough to represent it credibly.

Experienced executives ask difficult questions. They want to understand the investors, funding position, runway, decision-making structure, leadership team and founders' ambitions. They may ask why the position exists, what happened to the previous incumbent, how much authority they will have and what success should look like over several years.

A recruiter who knows little beyond the job specification will struggle to engage executives who have no pressing reason to leave their current company.

The recruitment process itself is worth examining when choosing an executive search firm.

A credible search should provide enough structure to assess candidates consistently without turning the appointment into an endurance test. Senior executives are usually assessing the business just as carefully as the business is assessing them, and the way a recruitment process is managed can influence their view of the company.

Before interviewing begins, the CEO, board, investors and HR leadership should ideally agree what the appointment is expected to achieve. If one director wants a strategic CFO while another expects the individual to rebuild the accounting function personally, candidates will quickly encounter the inconsistency.

Assessment should then concentrate on evidence.

If a candidate says they scaled a business, what did they personally change? If they completed acquisitions, what was their role? If they built a high-performing team, who did they recruit and how did the structure evolve? If revenue increased substantially, what part of that improvement can reasonably be attributed to their leadership?

Failures deserve discussion too. Executives who have spent meaningful time in growth companies will usually have encountered hiring mistakes, missed forecasts, unsuccessful initiatives and strategies that needed changing. The ability to explain what happened and how they responded can reveal considerably more about judgement than another carefully prepared success story.

References remain valuable for the same reason. Former CEOs, board members, investors, colleagues and direct reports see different sides of an executive. Together they can provide a much clearer picture of how somebody operates when the business is under pressure.

Scaleups should also examine how a search firm intends to assess cultural fit.

The term can become dangerously vague if it simply means finding somebody similar to the existing leadership team. What matters more is whether the individual's way of working is appropriate for the environment they are joining.

An executive accustomed to extensive support functions may become frustrated when asked to operate without them. Someone who has spent their career in early-stage businesses may resist the governance required as the organisation matures. A highly autonomous leader could struggle with a founder who remains closely involved, while an executive accustomed to clear direction may find a scaleup's ambiguity uncomfortable.

None of these characteristics is necessarily a weakness. Their relevance depends upon the company and the stage it has reached.

The relationship with the executive search firm should provide more than a shortlist.

A specialist recruiter spends considerably more time speaking to senior candidates than most individual companies ever could, and that should give clients a clearer view of the available talent market.

If the desired profile is unrealistic at the proposed remuneration, the client needs to know. If insisting on previous sector experience is excluding highly relevant candidates from adjacent markets, that should be discussed. If every credible candidate raises the same concern about the structure of the role, the search firm should be prepared to say so.

For HR Directors and Heads of People, the recruiter should complement rather than bypass the internal talent function. An experienced HR leader often understands the culture and organisational dynamics better than anybody outside the business. The search firm's contribution should be market reach, specialist assessment, external benchmarking and the ability to engage candidates the internal team may not naturally encounter.

The ability to challenge constructively can be considerably more valuable than simply producing a long shortlist.

Fram Professionals works with growth-stage, founder-led, VC-backed, private equity-backed, AIM-listed and PISCES businesses recruiting senior and leadership professionals across the UK.

Our work includes CFO and senior finance recruitment, COO and operational appointments, Sales Directors and Chief Revenue Officers, Marketing Directors, Chiefs of Staff, Non-Executive Directors and other leadership roles that become increasingly important as companies develop.

We are based in Bedfordshire and work nationally because senior candidate markets rarely conform to county boundaries. Fram Professionals is also the sister company of Fram Search, a specialist financial services executive search firm with more than sixteen years of market experience. This gives us access to established networks and candidate relationships across financial services, fintech and the investment community, which can be particularly relevant where a scaleup is recruiting executives who will work closely with investors or sophisticated financial stakeholders.

There is no objective list of the best executive search firms for scaleups that will be right for every business.

A specialist technology search firm may be the right choice for a highly technical appointment. A large international search business may make sense where the candidate market is genuinely global. A growth-company specialist may be more appropriate where the central challenge is finding executives who understand how to build organisations through a particular stage of development.

The more useful questions are these: does the firm understand scaleup leadership rather than simply senior recruitment? Can it distinguish somebody who has helped build a successful company from somebody who happened to work in one? Will it challenge an unrealistic specification? Can it reach executives who are not actively looking for jobs? And does it understand the ownership and investor environment in which the successful candidate will operate?

Those questions matter because scaleups are rarely recruiting executives to maintain an organisation exactly as it is.

They are recruiting them because the organisation needs to become something different.

If you are considering executive search for a scaleup or growth company, Fram Professionals can discuss the leadership requirement, the relevant UK candidate market and the experience likely to be required before you begin a search.