Companies Seek On-Demand Talent Solutions to Fill Expertise and Leadership Gaps and Drive Business Transformation

95% of executives anticipate challenges in securing the balanced mix of skills, capacity, and expertise over the next 3-5 years

CHICAGO, April 9, 2024 – Business Talent Group (BTG), a Heidrick & Struggles (Nasdaq: HSII) company, today released its 7th annual High-End Independent Talent Report, revealing how leading organizations are leveraging highly skilled, on-demand talent and interim leaders to access critical expertise amid significant talent shortages and navigate a landscape marked by constant change and technological advancements.

The report, based on proprietary BTG data, analyzed thousands of project requests from leaders across industries and functions. Since 2022, there has been a significant 170% increase in demand for on-demand leadership roles across finance, human resources, technology, and other functions. A separate global BTG study found that 95% of executives surveyed are concerned with identifying talent with a balanced mix of skills, capacity, and expertise in the next 3-5 years.

“The current talent landscape has fundamentally shifted as companies can no longer rely solely on traditional full-time hiring to access the capabilities they need,” said Sunny Ackerman, Global Managing Partner, On-Demand Talent at Heidrick & Struggles. “Strategic, forward-looking leaders are embracing on-demand talent as a core workforce strategy to inject leadership bandwidth, specialized skills, and organizational agility exactly when and where it's needed.”

KEY REPORT INSIGHTS INCLUDE:

• Organizations embrace interim leadership: 23% increase YOY and 170% increase since 2022 in the need for experienced and capable interim leaders. This pattern mirrors broader market data, which shows a 117% increase since 2022 in the use of interim executives in the C-suite across Fortune 1000 companies.
• The evolving needs and complexity of the office of the CFO: Requests for interim CFOs rose 46% YOY and demand for SVP and VP-level finance talent like Controllers and Heads of FP&A surged 114%. Requests for talent skilled in financial controls, accounting, and audit increased 33%, and financial planning, analysis and modeling increased 28%.
• Desire to advance big (data) picture thinking: 47% increase in demand for data, digital, and IT interim leaders at all levels and a 67% increase in CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs as organizations race to adopt AI and address cybersecurity threats.

About BTG 

Business Talent Group (BTG) is the leading talent company that connects independent management consultants, subject matter experts, project managers, and interim executives with the world’s best companies. BTG provides just the right on-demand talent needed: remote or on-site, part-time or full-time, individuals or teams, all around the world. That’s why more than 50% of the F100 and hundreds of other leading companies trust BTG to curate, vet, and compliantly deliver talent who fuel growth, innovation, and performance improvement. BTG is a Heidrick & Struggles company (Nasdaq: HSII). 

About Heidrick & Struggles 

Heidrick & Struggles (Nasdaq: HSII) is a premier provider of global leadership advisory and on-demand talent solutions, serving the senior-level talent and consulting needs of the world's top organizations. In our role as trusted leadership advisors, we partner with our clients to develop future-ready leaders and organizations, bringing together our services and offerings in executive search, diversity and inclusion, leadership assessment and development, organization and team acceleration, culture shaping and on-demand, independent talent solutions. Heidrick & Struggles pioneered the profession of executive search more than 70 years ago. Today, the firm provides integrated talent and human capital solutions to help our clients change the world, one leadership team at a time.® www.heidrick.com  

Media Contact 

Bianca Wilson  
Director, Public Relations, Americas  
Heidrick & Struggles 
bwilson@heidrick.com