2026 May- ESIX Chicago Roundtable

To kick off our ESIX Chicago Roundtable last week, we were lucky enough to hear from Rick Zalewski, Senior Director of Executive TA and Talent Intelligence at Stryker, all about his exec recruiting function's journey. One of the themes that he brought up, and which continued throughout the day, was focusing on rigorous assessment and execution to enable us, and our business leaders, to have high confidence in our organization's hiring decisions.

Other themes that came up in the ESIX: Executive Search Information Exchange Chicago Roundtable were the general dynamics of the market, with new types of roles that we're having to recruit for, plus the pace of the market, the constant drive to be more efficient, and the volatility of the current environment. Of course there are challenges and concerns around AI and its implementation and optimization, whilst continuing to keep data integrity and the risk of fraud top of mind, and in some cases also coming up against pressure from risk management or legal departments.

We covered some tactical items, like Quality of Hire (a perennial favorite), new tricks to collect executive interview feedback (always a challege), as well as working alongside executive onboarding to ensure the hires we spent so much time and money on hiring actually stay in the organization.

There's been a push over the last few years to get more involved in internal talent, and knowing the whole talent landscape - internal and external, and we heard of more organizations getting more deeply involved there. We also talked for some time about the value in proactive pipelining and connecting with internal succession programs, to try to see two to three steps ahead of the need. The ideal tactic there is to get all the leaders involved in recruiting and have them meet external people for exploratory discussions as and when they can, though this can take some coercing and coaching even for the most experienced business leaders. This kind of External Succession Planning (ESP as we call it) was deemed best to do for only a few commonly-agreed critical roles, so as not to 'boil the ocean' and dilute the impact, and executive sponsorship was essential in this endeavor.

And we covered so much more - always an inspiring discussion with an outstanding group of experts!