Executive Search Firm in Los Angeles Retained and engaged search for C-suite, VP and director hires

A studio replacing its CFO. A South Bay space supplier hiring its first chief information security officer. A logistics company near the ports looking for a chief operating officer. Three Los Angeles searches, three different pools of people, and the ones who’d fit rarely answer a job post. They have to be found. KORE1 runs retained and engaged executive search for Los Angeles companies hiring a CFO, a CTO, a security chief, an operations chief, a VP or a director.

The page is written for five sectors. Studios and streaming. South Bay aerospace and space. Ports and logistics. Health systems. And consumer brands. Studios need a CFO who knows production accounting cold. California’s film and television tax credit puts seven hundred fifty million dollars a year on the table through June twenty thirty, and that money comes with paperwork. In El Segundo, Hawthorne and Torrance, suppliers sell to Space Systems Command at Los Angeles Air Force Base. A defense customer asks hard questions about who runs security. Then the port. The Port of Los Angeles moved ten point two million twenty-foot container units in twenty twenty-five, and importers around it hire operators who’ve run that volume. The five sectors rarely trade people. And one search can start another. If a new studio CFO wants their own number two, a VP Finance search follows. Plan the pair together.

So, retained or engaged? Retained when nobody knows. Replacing a sitting CFO, filling a board-level seat, or hiring a studio executive whose exit isn’t public all need a quiet search, with one firm committed from day one. Engaged is for the visible pool. VP and director seats often fit, because the candidates are easier to find and you still want a committed firm without a full retainer. Either way, it’s the same four steps. Write the success profile. Build the market map. Run the slate and the interviews. Then make the offer and close it.

California changes the offer, and it catches out companies that last hired a leader in another state. Non-competes first. They’re void here. Since January first, twenty twenty-four, one is unenforceable wherever it was signed, and an employer can’t enter into one. So the offer protects the company with confidentiality, trade secret and invention assignment terms instead. Then pay. An employer with fifteen or more employees has to show the pay scale in any job posting, and nobody can ask for salary history, even through an agent. A search firm is that agent. We don’t ask. Conviction history waits until a job offer is made, under the California Fair Chance Act, and the city and the county of Los Angeles each have their own fair chance rules on top. Have your counsel review the offer. This is how the rules read to a recruiter. It isn’t legal advice.

What about the work while the seat is empty? Our index has no rate for a CFO, a CTO or a security chief, so we don’t quote one. What we can price is the senior contract work below the empty seat. A senior contract controller in Los Angeles bills a median of a hundred ninety-five dollars an hour, about a hundred and one thousand five hundred dollars for three months. The books keep closing while the board interviews. Our own program manager contractors in Southern California billed a hundred and five to a hundred and twenty-four dollars an hour, with a median of a hundred and sixteen, across twenty-one placements. And every California contractor we place as a W two employee of KORE1 gets at least forty hours or five days of paid sick leave a year. It sits inside the bill rate. Sometimes the interim person becomes the hire. Think about who ran the platform team while the CTO search dragged on. They’ve sat in every standup and met every vendor. A new CTO may well ask to keep them. After ten forty hours on assignment, the contractor can move to your payroll with no KORE1 fee. Two hundred seven of our five hundred fifty-two contract-to-hire placements made that move, across every role.

Boutique or global firm? Size is the wrong first filter. Devin Hornick, a partner at KORE1, put it this way. You want to work with a boutique firm, you’re going to get that warm type family feel. It costs a little bit more, but you get taken care of and you get transparency. Before you sign with anyone, ask three things. Who works the search day to day. Whether you’ll see the full market map. And who makes the reference calls. You might be wondering which roles we search for in Los Angeles. CFO, CTO, CIO, security and operations chiefs, plus VP and director seats in finance, technology and operations. And can a Los Angeles employer make a new executive sign a non-compete? No. It’s void, wherever it was signed. Tell us the seat, the sector, and whether it’s vacant now. Then the date it has to be filled. A recruiter will come back with how we’d run it. The full page is on KORE1.com.