Salary benchmarks, market reports, and career-strategy pieces from our partners and senior consultants — based on actual placements, not surveys. 38 pieces spanning 2021 to 2026.
Verified compensation ranges for Chief Financial Officers across New York industries — public, PE-backed, and pre-IPO — with the equity components most candidates miss.
Bay Area VPE comp has bifurcated. Mature tech firms pay one number; AI-native companies pay another. Here is the data, and why the gap matters.
Texas added more senior tech and finance roles in 2025 than any other US state outside California. A closer look at the migration, the salaries, and what is driving it.
Three quarters of professionals who accept a counter-offer leave within 18 months anyway. The data, the psychology behind it, and the rare cases where a counter-offer makes sense.
Recruiter impersonation scams have tripled in the past 18 months. Twelve red flags that separate a real recruiter from someone harvesting your data, your money, or your identity.
How to explore the market without your current employer finding out — without paying for premium LinkedIn settings that do not actually work.
Citadel, Ken Griffin, Carl Icahn, Microsoft, Amazon, Apollo — Miami’s Brickell now hosts a financial cluster that would have been unthinkable in 2019. What that means for senior talent.
Thirty pieces from 2021 to 2025 — salary guides, market analyses, and career-strategy pieces from the same team.
The FTC's attempted ban on non-compete agreements drew immediate legal challenges. By late 2025, the landscape for senior professionals with non-compete clauses in their employment agreements was genuinely different from 2023 — but not in the ways most people assumed.
By 2025, Denver-Boulder had quietly become the sixth-largest technology employment market in the United States. It's still small by SF or NYC standards. But the trajectory puts it in a different category from the "second tier" markets of a few years ago.
Atlanta has been a Fortune 500 city for decades — home to Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot, and others. In 2025, it is also quietly becoming a meaningful senior technology and financial services market. Here's what changed.
The Boston life sciences market in 2025 is distinguished by one specific dynamic: the GLP-1 wave has lifted the entire compensation floor for metabolic disease leadership while leaving other sub-sectors essentially flat. Here are the verified numbers.
Amazon and Microsoft together account for the largest concentration of senior technology employment in any US city outside San Francisco. The 2022-2024 tech layoff wave hit Seattle hard. The 2025 recovery has been real but uneven.
The CFO-to-CEO transition is the most common route from finance leadership to the top role. It's also one of the hardest pivots in senior US corporate careers, and it carries a compensation structure most CFOs don't anticipate.
Board compensation is real, the time commitment is real, and the legal exposure is realer than most candidates realize until they're in it. Here's the framework for evaluating a board seat invitation.
Refresh grants are the largest underdiscussed component of senior US compensation. A VP who successfully negotiates an equity refresh policy at signing will, over a 4-year tenure, receive 50% to 100% more in realized equity than a VP who accepts the offer without one.
Chicago spent 2022 and 2023 watching talent migrate to Miami and Dallas. Chicago's finance recovery story in 2024 is less dramatic than the migration stories but arguably more durable — built on a different foundation.
The 525-basis-point rate hike cycle of 2022-2023 changed how companies thought about headcount. At the senior level, the effects were specific and measurable — and they continue to echo into 2024.
Philadelphia doesn't get the press of Miami or Dallas. It's also not trying to. The 2024 Philadelphia finance scene is growing steadily in specific sectors — insurance, asset management, and the distinctive university-endowment ecosystem — and it's worth understanding.
The wave of "fractional C-suite" roles that emerged in 2022-2024 promised senior professionals flexibility and variety. For some, it delivered. For many others, it was a lower-paying temporary arrangement that delayed a better move. The data tells the story.
There is a specific stall point in US corporate careers that we see in our data more than any other: Director. Not individual contributors, not middle managers, not C-suite — Director. Here's what causes it and how to move through it.
In 2023, "AI" appeared in 12% of all US senior executive job postings — up from 1.4% in 2021. The flood of new AI-adjacent titles is changing comp benchmarks, career ladders, and what companies mean when they say "senior."
Media. Retail. Traditional financial services. A meaningful number of senior US professionals are employed in industries where the total headcount is structurally declining. The playbook for navigating that is different from the standard career-transition advice.
By 2023, salary disclosure laws covered roughly 20% of the US workforce. Senior professionals who know how to read and use posted ranges have a meaningful advantage in compensation negotiation. Most don't.
Every senior professional has been advised to "never take a step back." The data from our placements suggests this advice is often wrong — and that some of the best career moves in our sample involved a candidate taking a lower title at a substantially better company.
This piece is awkward to write, because we are the product we're describing. But it's a question we get asked directly by candidates who've been burned by bad recruiting experiences, and we think it deserves a candid answer.
The operating partner role sits in an unusual compensation structure — part advisory, part executive, with carried interest that may or may not pay out. In 2023, the range for senior PE operating partners ran from $400K to well over $3M annually. Stage and fund size determine where.
In 2019, 78% of US hedge fund assets were managed from New York, Chicago, or Connecticut. By the end of 2022 that number was 68%. Ten percentage points doesn't sound dramatic. It represents hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of senior careers.
2022 saw the highest voluntary departure rate among senior engineering leaders at major US tech companies in a decade. The exits were not random. They followed a pattern — and understanding that pattern explains a lot about where senior tech talent went.
Companies told us remote-capable roles wouldn't carry comp penalties. The 2022 data told a different story — remote senior professionals earned 7% less on average than comparable on-site roles at the same companies. Here's why.
Hospital system CFOs, VP Medical Affairs, COOs of large health systems — healthcare administration compensation is large, structurally different from corporate finance, and almost completely undocumented in public benchmarks. We're fixing that.
The in-house legal market in 2022 was defined by one trend: companies hiring aggressively to internalize work previously done by outside counsel, at pay scales that made the move attractive. Here's what that looked like in practice.
Bank failures are rare enough that most senior finance professionals have never directly experienced one. The SVB collapse in 2023 provided an unexpected case study in how institutional knowledge disperses — and how the senior talent market absorbs it.
Conventional wisdom says senior careers go up. The actual data says the most valuable moves often go sideways — into a new industry, a new function, or a smaller company with a larger mandate.
Most candidates focus on grant size. The variables that actually determine realized value — vesting schedule, refresh policy, acceleration, and tax treatment — are almost always negotiable and almost always ignored.
Quit rates hit 3% among US workers in late 2021. Among senior executives and VP-level professionals, the equivalent figure was under 1%. The dynamics of senior labor markets are fundamentally different from what the headlines described.
In 2015, fewer than 400 US companies had a CRO. By 2021, more than 8,000 did. The title was invented to solve a structural problem — siloed sales and marketing — and its pay reflects how important that problem has become.
Kendall Square now has more biotech R&D spending per square mile than anywhere else on earth. The labor market for senior science and clinical leadership reflects that concentration — and behaves by different rules than any other senior US market.