Executive search / labor market / practical AI
Finance leaders.
Found properly.
I place finance and accounting leaders at PE-backed and privately held companies. I also write about the incentives, systems, and bad decisions behind how companies hire.
01Executive search
02Recruiting commentary
03AI systems that work
Finance leadership / PE-backed companies / Honest search process / No recruiter theater / Finance leadership / PE-backed companies / Honest search process / No recruiter theater /
01 / Work
A recruiter who understands the actual decision.
Compensation. Commute. Reporting line. Sponsor dynamics. What the company needs, what the candidate wants, and whether the process is even real.
01 / Recruiter
Finance leadership search
Accounting and finance leaders for PE-backed and private companies. CFO, VP Finance, Controller, and the operators below them.
02 / Process
No résumé avalanche
A clear brief. Honest feedback. Fewer candidates. Better decisions. Seeing 20 résumés is usually indecision dressed up as diligence.
03 / Judgment
The messy part matters
Offers get accepted for reasons that do not fit in an ATS. The work is understanding the real tradeoffs before the final call.
02 / Writing
Labor-market commentary without the moral lesson.
“Most hiring problems are not talent shortages. They are indecision with a job description attached.
Recruiting commentary
Recruiting mechanisms, compensation truth, AI’s impact on work, and what happens when nobody wants to make the call.
03 / AI
AI is useful when it survives contact with real work.
Human judgment
Local context
Real output
Current operating thesis
I build and test AI workflows for research, recruiting, writing, and daily operations. The standard is not whether the demo looks clever. It is whether the system saves time without quietly making the work worse.
01Keep sensitive context local when possible.
02Put a human between the model and the irreversible action.
03Measure the output, not the number of agents involved.
04 / About
Philadelphia
I’m Greg Houlihan. I run executive searches focused on finance and accounting leaders for PE-backed and private companies.
I care about what makes a search work after the intake call: a real brief, honest feedback, practical candidate judgment, and somebody willing to tell the client when the process has gone sideways.
The rest of my time goes into writing and building AI systems that are useful outside a demo.
05 / Contact