“If you’re a $5 billion company and you’ve been searching for a person for a year, what’s three more months?”

The TPF Q&A with executive search guru Michael Ardelean

Making the wrong hire costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours. If you’re looking for a c-suite creative or a senior-level design director, there’s a guy for that: Michael Ardelean. But Ardelean isn’t like other headhunters. He doesn’t spam potential candidates with LinkedIn messages. He’s calm, elegant, strategic, and came to the recruiting world in a roundabout way. After years as a professional BMX rider, he talked his old sponsor, Giant, into giving him a job on the product side of things, which led to a decade in fashion merchandising and then a stint at a boutique design firm. He founded his LA-based executive search firm Intro Limited in 2020, where they place high-level creative and marketing people at Puma, Frame, Buck Mason, Wasserman, and a few we can’t mention here.

We talked about his career path, how his newsletter Intro Limited drives business, the talent shortage, and how easy it is to spot AI slop on LinkedIn.

Michael Ardelean is your guy.

Three Point Four Media: Let’s start with the newsletter. Does it function like a front door for Intro Limited? Does it drive business?

Michael Ardelean: It branched off from the real business. But now it’s driving the business, because I’m over here having fun on the side, and that’s how life works.

I’ve had a couple clients that have straight up come to me and said, “I like how you think about talent. Let’s work together.”

Most of the time, how it happens is over time they notice it, they see it, we have offline chats. It’s more about awareness. They know what it is I do so when they need it they can reach out. But I would say the last two years, every new client has been an indirect result of the newsletter.

Is it a mix of Substack subscribers and people finding it on LinkedIn?

It’s an equal mix. Sometimes Instagram. But I’d say Instagram is a little more obscure. Most of my friends on Instagram don’t know what I do for a living vs. other platforms.

What do you tell people you do for a living? Do you say “I get cool people, cool jobs”?

[Laughs] Basically! Small business owner, if I want to keep it short. It’s funny, because every word used to describe what I do is kind of a dirty word—like “headhunter” or “recruiter”—but I use it anyway, because I know they know what that means, and it’s easier than trying to use flowery language and then have them say, “Oh, so you mean you’re a recruiter.”

We run into that a lot. We’re not a traditional creative agency, we’re not an advertising agency, we’re not a content marketing shop. But if you say “creative studio” or “creative agency” that means something, right?

Right! There’s positioning—which is what you just said—and then there’s the full suite of services. If you lead with the full suite of services, it’s too overwhelming and confusing for people. If you just say your positioning, it keeps it short. We work in executive search for design and marketing. We’ve placed CFOs before, but if I said we work in design and finance? Nobody understands that.

After your pro career, you went to work for your old sponsor Giant. Was there an on-ramp for former athletes, or did you make that happen yourself?

I made it happen by pestering them until they gave me a job. But they were gracious enough to do so and teach me. They brought me in at an entry-level product management position. I had inherent taste and an inherent ability with basic math. They taught me Excel. Six months in I was pulling my weight.

I met a guy who became a mentor and gave me a chance in the fashion space, which was way more interesting to me than bikes. I was in fashion merchandising for about a decade and I was prematurely promoted a couple times, which is how I learned about leadership in a fast-tracked way. Then I was a partner in a boutique design studio.

I had this broad direction towards people, towards something creative and tasteful, towards advancement and betterment. But I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly that was. After those three careers stacked up on each other, it was like, “Oh, maybe it’s executive search and career advancement.”

How exactly does the executive search process work? Do your clients come to you and say “we need a CMO” and then it’s a mix of your Rolodex with finding cool and smart people that are the right fit?

That’s exactly how it works. Our objective is to fulfill the search with as few candidates as possible. It doesn’t always turn out that way because clients think they know exactly what they want and then that evolves as they see real people. We always say our second meeting is more enlightening to both parties than our first one because the first one’s theoretical, the second one, they’re looking at real profiles.

There are companies who need a true unicorn, and they know it’s difficult to find that person.

There are also companies who are just like “our time is more valuable than our money. I don’t want to post it on LinkedIn to see 1,200 responses. I want five of the best.”

You’re handling the process so they don’t have to think about it and they can just talk to the candidates.

A lot of it is driving the process. It’s project management. And in their defense, a lot of the times when a hire needs to be made, if you’re the SVP of design and tell your design director that they need to hire a design manager, you’re just giving that design director extra work. You’re giving them a job on top of their own job. We approach every client relationship knowing that even though they want the utmost, highest quality service, they don’t want to be given homework, and they want it to take as little time and effort on their part as possible. We’re always really cognizant of that.

How much has the business changed in the five years since you launched?

We’ve seen a gradual movement toward this space we’re in now where the world has a candidate surplus and a talent shortage. There’s no middle class of talent, or it’s decreasing. My grandpa worked on the assembly line at Ford for 40 years. It was a skilled position, but it wasn’t a position where his skills needed to continually increase over time with ambition and all of that. It was more like show up and be consistent, which are quality character traits. But that doesn’t get you anywhere in this age, right?

We have a talent sorting problem, and that’s what our clients are really coming to us for now.

When you say talent sorting problem, do you mean the good people don’t want to leave their jobs?

There are so many candidates that it’s almost like there’s no candidates. You’re not screening for experience or a good portfolio anymore. You’re screening for worldview: what does this person believe that drives their behavior that’s going to make them a good add to this culture?

When I talk to people who have to hire it sounds really hard to find the right person. How do you do it? Is it word of mouth? That’s how I landed every job before Three Point Four and almost all of our work here: because I knew somebody. That wasn’t nepotism, it was just trust.

You just said it better than I could. I’ve never met anyone, including myself, who landed their dream job by AI optimizing their application and sending 100 of them a week. It’s always someone you know. And it isn’t nepotism, it’s trust. People hire people they know and they know people they trust, and vice versa.

Hiring is hard because you’re trying to make a prediction based on limited information. It’s a calculated risk. We’re there to help make it a little more calculated, to do the hand holding, and then to guarantee our work if it doesn’t work out.

Are your clients asking you to find people for fractional or contract help? Or are you strictly placing people with full-time jobs?

We do both. I’m a huge believer that freelance is the future, or maybe the freelance mentality is the future. And I think our clients are looking for that entrepreneurial mindset in their full-time roles too.

How often do people get cold feet?

It fortunately happens usually before a late stage. Though we once had a woman sign the offer letter and start the process of relocating her family. She came to LA and went to the wrong neighborhood and was like, “Nope. Nevermind.”

Most of the time the cold feet happens around the final interview stage where someone who has postured like they really, really want the role has decided this is not the role for them.

Earlier you mentioned something about people using AI to optimize their resumes. Can you tell when someone used AI to write their resume or cover letter?

Oh yeah. It’s prevalent in everything. I can tell when somebody writes their LinkedIn post with AI…

…railing against AI slop!

[Laughs] Exactly! It’s pretty obvious. I don’t want to downplay the existence of this. I would just say in our world, for leadership positions, our clients don’t have AI screeners in place, at least not for the roles we work on.

Next week is Thanksgiving. Is everyone just telling you “we should talk in the new year” now? Or are people still hiring?

We are slammed right now. My caveat to that is—and I’ll generalize—large corporate entities will call me and verbally say, “Hey, I have four roles I’m really going to need, but it’s budget season. And we’ll call you in January.” But we work with a lot of small-to-medium sized brands who ignore that stuff. If they need to make the hire, they need it ASAP.

As a team, we try to relax and reflect at the end of the year, and do all the end-of-year things that not everyone has the luxury of doing. But if clients are calling…

We’ve had the same experience with big corporations, where Q1 actually means Q2.

This happens to us all the time, like “we tried three other firms, we have confirmed that this is an impossible hire. Now it’s your turn.” So I tend to say yes to a big challenge. But in that scenario, if you’re a $5 billion company and you’ve been searching for a person for a year, what’s three more months? They’re like “we’ll call you next week,” and then they call in three weeks.

That rings true to me. We want to work with you, and then you work with them six months later.

I’ve given up on trying to Tetris the workload based on intention, and now it’s just more first come, first served. Our clients become our friends, and we have a good relationship with everyone we work with. We’ll always accommodate. But you telling me you need a design director is different than showing up, discussing the brief, and kicking off the search.

“Starting from zero followers is freeing.”