Our executive search firm helps nonprofits and social impact organizations build high-performance teams.

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Why Choose DRiWaterstone

You’re not like any other purpose or mission-driven organization. We’re not like any other nonprofit search firm.

After decades of leading purpose and mission-driven organizations, DRiWaterstone’s founders set out to create an executive search firm designed especially for this sector. We know that our nonprofit and social impact clients need us to deliver transformative candidates quickly, and we meet that challenge: 97% of our candidates come from our own active outreach and we present them within 60 days.

But we believe purpose and mission-driven organizations deserve more.

In addition to recruiting high-quality candidates, our executive search experts engage stakeholders in ways that lay the groundwork for the selected candidate’s ultimate success. We also pay careful attention to each client’s reputation among the many high-quality candidates who are not selected. And we remain available to advise our clients long after a search concludes.

We can do these things because we have an unparalleled understanding of the nonprofit and social impact sectors. We understand what it is like to work with stakeholders, not customers; to build a fundraising program from the ground up; to imagine a sustainable way to serve those who are overlooked or a novel way to address an intractable problem. We move fluently between staffing and strategy. That’s how we add significant value and save significant expense.

DRiWaterstone has built the resources to deliver on our promise:

Our Team

We are deliberately structured to ensure that one of our leaders plays a hands-on role in every search we conduct. This rare, high-caliber approach to executive search allows us to align our searches with our clients’ most important strategic goals. Our leaders are supported by a carefully structured team of specialists that works together on every assignment. Drawing on our experience with purpose and mission-driven organizations, our staff includes a dedicated Candidate Stewardship Associate who ensures that candidates have positive impressions of our clients—no matter the outcome of their own candidacies.

Our Network

DRiWaterstone maintains one of the largest networks of leaders qualified for non-profit and social impact organizations in the country, and we have the single largest network of highly-qualified development staff. We use cutting-edge search technologies to put this network at our and our clients’ fingertips, whether we are searching for someone who understands how to build partnerships with NGOs in Africa or for someone who understands the major donor community in the Midwest.

Our Integrity

After decades of work with some of the most recognizable and effective non-profit and social impact organizations in the world, we have the expertise and the courage to tell you what is right for your organization.

Our Commitment to DE&I

DRiWaterstone Human Capital’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) dates to its founding, and has been recognized in the latest Hunt Scanlon HR/Diversity Power 65 Rankings

We believe that it is only through DE&I that communities can reach their full potential. It’s also an essential component for organizations that want to build a high-performance culture. That’s why we make it a priority to recruit diverse talent for every search.

Why Retained Search?

DRiWaterstone works on a retained basis. That means we commit to devoting whatever resources are necessary to identify, assess, and recruit the leaders you need. By investing resources into your organization, we can identify the high-quality candidates who are both passionate about your mission and uniquely suited to make dynamic contributions to your culture, strategic plan, and day-to-day operations. And we can spend time recruiting them to your organization—not marketing them to whatever organization hires them first.

This investment of resources is what drives DRiWaterstone’s 98% success rate in completing searches and in placing candidates who commit to and stay with your organization. Other firms that do not have these up-front resources and instead work on commission so must restrict themselves to generic lists of candidates who may accept an offer only to leave a few months down the road.

How to Get Started

Learn more about DRiWaterstone ‘s executive search process and contact us to schedule a conversation about your executive search needs.