Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Unlike generalist recruiting firms that rely on keyword searches on public job boards, People Capital Executive Search brings operational credibility to every search. Our founder and CEO, Bob Lyman, scaled a food contract manufacturer from the inside before launching the firm in 2007 (more on his story on our About page). That perspective, combined with a network of more than 30,000 industry professionals built over nearly two decades, is what separates us from general competitors and internal hiring teams alike.

People Capital Executive Search is a global executive search firm in the USA, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with an additional regional office in Bradenton, Florida.While we are rooted in the United States, our placement capabilities are global; we have successfully placed executive talent across the USA, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Australia using both retained and contingency search models.

Search Savvy is People Capital Executive Search's proprietary approach to executive search, built over nearly 20 years of exclusive focus on the food, beverage, ingredient, and related industries. It treats talent acquisition as a sales-grade discipline: it starts with deeply understanding the client's business, culture, and the role's real requirements; it uses both an extensive, trust-based network of more than 30,000 industry professionals and comprehensive research to reach passive candidates who aren't on job boards; and it filters every candidate for cultural fit and work style, not just skills, before presentation. The result is faster searches, typically under six weeks, and placements known for making long runs.

Internal teams and job postings reach candidates who are actively looking. The strongest leaders in food, beverage, ingredient, and related industries usually aren't; they're employed, well-compensated, and not scanning job boards. Reaching them takes trusted relationships built over years (see our Process page for how that works), and it's exactly what lets us typically fill roles in under six weeks with better retention than a search starting from scratch.