C Suite Recruiters
When a critical leadership seat goes vacant, the pressure lands everywhere at once. Production decisions stall, team dynamics shift, and the people who should be focused on strategy end up managing problems that belong to someone else. Finding the right person through a disciplined, thoughtful process is exactly what Onboard Recruiting Partners was built to do. As retained C‑suite recruiters serving growing companies from Rochester Hills, Michigan, the firm works with clients across the United States to place leadership talent that lasts.
What Sets a Retained Search Apart
Most hiring processes move fast because the pressure to fill a seat is real. But speed without structure tends to produce hires that look right on paper and struggle in practice. Onboard Recruiting Partners operates on a retained model, which means every engagement is a dedicated, committed partnership from the start, not a race to submit names first.
Founder Chris Masson brings more than twenty-five years of direct management experience from corporate environments and his own entrepreneurial work. That background shapes how Onboard approaches every search: from an operator’s perspective, not a purely transactional one. When C‑suite recruiters understand what it actually takes to run a complex organization, the conversations they have with candidates go deeper, and the assessments they bring to clients are more reliable.
How Onboard Evaluates Leadership
Resumes describe history. They do not describe how a person leads under pressure, how they build accountability within a team, or whether their instincts match the environment they are stepping into. Onboard Recruiting Partners examines all of these factors before a candidate is ever presented to a client.
The firm’s evaluation process centers on three things:
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Leadership approach: How candidates have built and managed teams, handled difficult personnel decisions, and established expectations across a reporting structure.
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Operational depth: Whether their experience reflects genuine complexity or a narrower scope that would leave them underprepared for the role.
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Cultural alignment: How their style and values fit the specific team dynamics and growth stage of the hiring organization.
This is particularly relevant for functional leaders in operations, where the difference between a warehousing generalist and someone who has managed multi-site distribution at scale is significant, and easy to miss if you are only reading credentials.
The Roles Onboard Recruiting Partners Fills
The firm focuses exclusively on leadership and key functional positions. That focus is intentional. Every search is handled personally by Chris Masson, which means clients work directly with the person who actually runs the search, not an account manager passing information between layers.
Core functional areas include:
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Operations: Directors and VPs overseeing multi-site facilities, distribution, logistics, and supply chain leadership.
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Human Resources: Senior HR leaders who can build people infrastructure in growing organizations.
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Engineering: Technical and functional leaders who can manage both projects and teams.
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Marketing: Executives who own brand, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy.
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Merchant functions: Category and buying leadership for product-driven businesses.
If your organization sits in the fifty to five hundred employee range and is building out a leadership team that needs to perform, Onboard Recruiting Partners is structured to support exactly that stage of growth.
A Search Process Built Around Honest Alignment
Before any search begins, Onboard works with hiring stakeholders to reach genuine internal alignment on what the role requires. Not just the job description, but the leadership gap the hire needs to fill, the team dynamics already in place, and the operating conditions the new leader will inherit from day one.
That conversation sometimes surfaces disagreements between stakeholders that, if left unaddressed, would undermine the search from the start. Resolving those questions early is one of the most practical things C‑suite recruiters can do for a client organization. It protects the hire, the team, and the time already invested in the search.
If a critical leadership role is open and you want a search process built around fit rather than speed, the form below is a direct way to start that conversation with Onboard Recruiting Partners.
In our experience, aligning stakeholders early reduces rework and speeds time-to-impact for new leaders. Practitioners in this field often report that a well-scoped role leads to higher turnover-free first-year outcomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to work with retained C‑suite recruiters versus contingency recruiters?
In a retained search, the client engages the firm exclusively for the search, and the firm commits fully to that engagement. This structure aligns the recruiter’s work with finding the right long-term hire, not simply the fastest candidate to submit. Contingency firms, by contrast, are only paid if their candidate is hired, which creates an incentive to move quickly rather than carefully. Onboard Recruiting Partners operates exclusively on a retained basis, which means every search receives dedicated attention and a structured evaluation process from start to finish.
What types of companies does Onboard Recruiting Partners typically work with?
Onboard Recruiting Partners primarily serves companies in the fifty to five hundred employee range that are actively building or strengthening their leadership teams. These are often growth-stage businesses in industries such as industrial distribution, manufacturing, professional services, and product-driven companies. The firm works with clients across the United States, headquartered in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and does not limit its practice to any single geography or vertical.
How does Onboard Recruiting Partners evaluate candidates beyond reviewing their resume?
The firm’s process is designed to surface how a candidate actually leads, not just what they have done. That means structured conversations around leadership style, how they have managed conflict and underperformance, how they build accountability across a team, and whether their experience reflects the specific complexity the client’s role demands. For operational leadership roles in particular, Onboard distinguishes between candidates with broad general experience and those who have genuinely managed at the level of complexity the hiring company needs. Cultural and team dynamics fit is evaluated before any candidate is presented to the client.
Who actually runs the search when a company engages Onboard Recruiting Partners?
Founder Chris Masson personally runs every search. Clients do not work through account managers or hand off to junior staff after the kickoff call. This is a deliberate choice that reflects how the firm believes searches should be conducted: with consistent, expert-level attention throughout the process. Chris’s background spans more than twenty-five years of direct management experience in corporate environments including Sherwin-Williams and AkzoNobel, as well as his own entrepreneurial venture, which means he approaches candidate evaluation as a practitioner, not just as a recruiter.
Why is internal alignment between stakeholders so important before a search begins?
When the hiring manager and the HR lead have different definitions of what the role requires, or when the leadership team has not aligned on the kind of leader they actually need, the search often stalls or produces a hire that satisfies one stakeholder but not another. Onboard Recruiting Partners builds stakeholder alignment into the front end of every engagement. This means working through the real requirements of the role, the team conditions the new leader will inherit, and any internal disagreements that could affect the search or the hire’s success. Addressing these questions early protects the entire investment of the hiring process.
What functional areas does Onboard Recruiting Partners specialize in for executive search?
The firm focuses on leadership and key functional roles across operations, human resources, engineering, marketing, and merchant functions. Within operations, this includes director and vice president level roles in distribution, supply chain, logistics, and multi-site facility management. Onboard does not engage in high-volume or entry-level staffing. Every search the firm accepts is for a role where the hire will have a meaningful, lasting impact on the organization’s performance and team structure.