What 225 Leadership Placements Reveal About Nonprofit Executive Search

When the process is right, the results follow. Here is what four years of data shows.

Over the past four years, Edgility Search has placed over 225 leaders across more than 115 education, nonprofit and social impact organizations with a 95% success rate. That number is worth sitting with. Not as a diversity achievement, not as proof of a particular philosophy, but as the output of a search methodology built on rigor, transparency, and a serious commitment to sourcing top candidates.

The logic is straightforward. When a search is designed to draw from the broadest possible pool, when evaluation criteria are specific and applied consistently, and when candidates can trust the process they are walking into, particular leaders emerge. They emerge because they are objectively the best. The process did not produce them by aiming for a demographic outcome. It produced them by aiming for quality.

Black History Month is a meaningful occasion to publish this data, and to be specific about what it reflects. The contributions of Black leaders to American public life, to education, to nonprofit and civic institutions, deserve more than acknowledgment. They deserve the conditions that make leadership possible - which in our case includes a meticulous search process built to uncover the leaders who are often overlooked.

By the Numbers

Here is a snapshot of Edgility Search's nonprofit executive search process, by the results it produces:

• More than 225 executive placements across more than 115 organizations nationwide
• 95% placement success rate
• 73% of placements identify as leaders of color overall
• 50% of all placements identify as women of color
• 63% of CEO and Executive Director placements are leaders of color
• 73% of Head of School placements are leaders of color
• More than 60% of leaders we place have identified as non-white every year over the past five years

For context: BoardSource's Leading with Intent report indicates that roughly 15% to 20% of nonprofit CEOs nationally are people of color. Edgility Search's CEO placement rate for leaders of color sits at 63%.

What Our Data Shows

Breaking it Down: More than 200 placements across more than 100 organizations

Edgility Search has placed leaders across more than 100 organizations spanning education, workforce development, health equity, housing, and community development. Those placements reach every region of the country: One third in the Northeast, another third on the West Coast, with the remaining third coming from communities across the Mid-Atlantic, South, and beyond. The data shows that talent is not concentrated in a few select markets. It never was.

In addition, more than 70% of those placements are leaders of color, with 50% identifying as women of color. These figures were not targets or “quotas” set by the Edgility team. Nor were they the result of adjusting criteria partway through a search or applying different standards to different candidates. These numbers show that when sourcing is deep enough, and evaluation is objective, the most qualified candidates surface without the constraints of race or gender.

Edgility Search's approach to data-driven leadership recruitment treats sourcing as the highest-leverage phase of any search. A narrow pool produces a narrow outcome, regardless of how carefully the finalist stage is run. That principle shapes everything upstream.

Who Rises to the Top: CEO and Executive Director Placements

CEO and Executive Director searches are the most scrutinized work the Edgility team does, and rightfully so. Boards are invested, stakeholders are watchful, and the consequences of a wrong placement are substantial: lost organizational momentum, eroded community trust, and the time and cost of starting over. With so much at stake, these are the most complicated of searches. They are also where the numbers are most compelling. Even though BIPOC individuals continue to face challenges in their path to leadership, of Edgility’s CEO and Executive Director placements, 63% are leaders of color and 39% identify as women of color. This suggests that while internal practices for some organizations may be unintentionally engaging in hiring biases, implementing high-quality, equity-minded and transparent search practices like those we use at Edgility Search can actively combat it.

Additionally, at the time of this blog, Edgility has completed over 35 other Chief-level placements for leaders of color across a wide range of functions: CFO, COO, CPO, Chief Academic Officer, Chief Equity Officer, and others. These leaders are not being routed into particular roles or concentrated in specific lanes. The evidence-based executive search process Edgility uses identifies the strongest candidate for the specific role on the table.

These results demonstrate that the issue of a lack of diversity in C-suite placements nationally is not caused by a lack of talent or even a lack of diverse talent. It’s caused by the reliance on the typical search process, one that isn’t prepared to look for or find the most qualified leaders, who also happen to represent a more diverse range of backgrounds and experiences.

School Leadership: Principals and Heads of School

In school leadership, research from the Wallace Foundation and the Learning Policy Institute points consistently to school leadership quality as one of the most significant variables in student outcomes, with particular benefit documented when leaders reflect the communities they serve. Of Edgility’s Head of School placements, 73% are leaders of color, and of those placements, 96% are women of color. These extraordinary leaders are creating positive change in their schools by managing budgets, setting academic strategy, hiring and developing staff, and building school cultures from the ground up. These transformational principals, heads of school and executive directors are showing their schools and communities every day why they were selected – because they were the strongest candidate in their pool.

Consistency Over Time

Perhaps the most telling data point is also the quietest one. Edgility Search's placement rate for leaders of color has held between 62% and 74% every year from 2022 through 2025. That kind of consistency is only possible when outcomes are a function of process rather than circumstance. When an organization builds a search grounded in rigorous sourcing, objective evaluation, genuine stakeholder accountability, and results stabilized around excellence, outcomes are not subject to a cultural moment or contract under organizational pressure. They’re delivered through intentional practices.

The consistency in Edgility’s numbers is not incidental. It’s an intentional move towards creating positive change through sourcing, evaluating, and placing exceptional talent.

Why Edgility’s Search Process Works

Building the Candidate Pool

Every search has a point of highest leverage, and for Edgility Search, that point arrives before a single candidate is evaluated. It starts with proactive, strategic candidate sourcing. Rather than waiting for applications, the Edgility Search team actively maps and recruits talent across communities, networks, and geographies that most conventional processes never reach. The result is a candidate pool that is broad, deep, and genuinely representative from the outset. Not as an afterthought, but by design.

When the pool is built with that level of intention, the evaluation does not have to compensate for who is missing. It can focus entirely on identifying who is most qualified. That is a different kind of search.

Objective Evaluation

Edgility Search's expert evaluation framework is built around what research and experience indicate actually predicts leadership success: judgment under pressure, clarity of vision, organizational credibility, and specific fit for the moment the hiring organization is navigating. The framework deliberately discourages bias and excludes criteria that function as proxies for familiarity rather than qualifications, like academic pedigree, network proximity or the problematic reliance on "culture fit" as it is typically applied. Once the fog of a typical approach clears, the hiring committee will be able to challenge their perceptions of what a “unicorn” looks like to identify the right candidate for the position.

Trust as a Competitive Advantage

At Edgility, senior leaders pay close attention to how a search is run, particularly those who have navigated opaque or inconsistent hiring processes before. A process that is equitable and transparent signals that the organization is serious, that the evaluation will be fair, and that it is worth staying in. Strong candidates have options - they only stay engaged with processes they trust and quickly exit ones they don't.

That trust is structural to Edgility Search's results, not incidental to them. A firm with a reputation for running searches with integrity attracts stronger candidate engagement at every stage, and that engagement shapes the finalist slate that boards ultimately see. For hiring organizations, this is a practical point: the quality of your process determines the quality of the pool you evaluate. The process honors the candidate, and earns the organization a strong match

Placement Spotlight: Edgility’s Work in Action

While numbers and data describe patterns, they don't describe people. What follows is a review of a recent CEO search run by the Edgility Search team, and a celebration of the leader who emerged from a deliberate search process.

Dr. Nathalie Henderson, CEO — KIPP St. Louis

When KIPP St. Louis launched its CEO search, the stakes were significant. It was the organization's first chief executive search in 16 years. A founding leader was transitioning out, and the schools were at a genuine inflection point. The community had a clear sense of what the next chapter needed to look like, and the search had to be built around that clarity.

Edgility Search Principal Taylor Bostock spent 36 hours on the ground before a single candidate was evaluated, meeting with board members, the C-suite, teachers, staff, families, and community partners. All to identify what was most important, what kind of leader was needed, and to identify crucial competencies for evaluation. Ultimately, five leadership competencies emerged from those conversations: equity leadership, academic and instructional expertise, people leadership, organizational leadership, and change management. Those five competencies became the evaluation framework that every candidate in the national pool was assessed against, consistently and objectively.

Dr. Nathalie Henderson distinguished herself on all five. She brought a documented track record of improving academic outcomes, a data-informed approach to organizational decision-making, and the kind of executive presence that earns trust quickly in complex environments. She also brought something the community had specifically asked for: deep roots in St. Louis. Her vision for the organization was not abstract. It was grounded in the specific students, families, and context she was being asked to lead.

Ashley Odham, Chief of Staff at KIPP St. Louis, described what the process made possible: "Taylor guided us with clarity and neutrality, brought top talent from across the country, and ensured the community's voice shaped every step of the process." Of Dr. Henderson specifically, Odham noted: "Nathalie balances big-picture vision with practical experience. She has a clear track record of improving student outcomes and building sustainable systems. She is absolutely the right leader for this moment."

In her first months as CEO, Dr. Henderson has exceeded enrollment goals by 107%, improved student attendance, and strengthened the organizational systems that support academic growth. These are not symbolic early wins. They are evidence that the community's assessment was correct, and that the search process surfaced exactly who it was designed to find.

What This Means for the Sector

Social impact organizations exist to take on challenges that neither conventional markets nor governments have been willing or able to solve on their own. In practice, this looks like providing services or support to underserved communities. There is a reasonable expectation, grounded in evidence as well as principle, that the leaders running those organizations should reflect the people they serve. Not because it signals the right values, but because proximity to lived experience shapes strategy, builds community trust, and produces better outcomes for the people the organization exists to help.

More often than not, the leader who has that crucial lived experience is a person of color. However, many organizations still struggle to find or support the leaders they so desperately need. BoardSource and Race2Lead research documents a persistent gap in executive leadership representation across the nonprofit sector. Edgility Search's data offers a specific counter-argument: the talent is not missing. It exists in every region. What varies is not availability, it is how hard, and how well, organizations search for that talent.

At a moment when some institutions are retreating from intentional, DEI-focused hiring practices, this data carries particular weight. A fair, competitive, and transparent search process does not trade quality for representation. It finds highly-skilled candidates that a less rigorous process might never surface. The argument for doing this well is not an argument about values. It is an argument about outcomes, and about the organizational cost of settling.

What Hiring Organizations Should Know

For boards and executive teams navigating a nonprofit executive search, the evidence from Edgility Search's work points to three practices that are not optional.

Build the pool first. The single most consequential decision in any search is made before a resume is reviewed. If the candidate pool does not reflect the communities the organization serves, the process has already failed to attract the right candidates. For boards with a fiduciary responsibility to find the most qualified leader, a narrow pool is not a neutral outcome. It is a governance failure.

Make your process transparent. A process that is inconsistent, inaccessible, or opaque loses the trust of the strongest candidates well before the finalist stage. Senior leaders have options, and they engage with processes they believe are fair. Transparency is not just a courtesy extended to candidates. It is a prerequisite for attracting the people worth hiring. Boards that wonder why their finalist slates feel thin should explore what aspect of the process actively discouraged candidates from continuing.

Measure your outcomes. Without tracking who is being sourced, interviewed, and placed, there is no way to evaluate whether the process is producing sound outcomes. Accountability is a discipline, not a declaration. Edgility Search tracks this data across every search because the numbers are the only honest measure of whether the methodology is working. Organizations that do not measure cannot improve, and cannot know whether the search they ran was the best available option or simply the most familiar one.

Sound practices for nonprofit CEO transitions and long-term leadership placements are not conceptually complicated. However, executing them cohesively and with integrity is where most organizations fall short. Taking the time to do it well creates stronger outcomes, not just for the process, but for the organization itself, like in the case of Dr. Henderson’s appointment at KIPP St. Louis.

Actions, Not Words

225 placements. 115 organizations. Leaders who are running schools, setting strategy, managing institutions, and building something lasting in communities across the country. This is what a search process built intentionally produces. Not once, not in a single strong year, but consistently, across every region, every function, and every level of the organizational chart.

February is the right moment to name this explicitly. The more durable commitment is what happens in March, and every month after. Edgility's placement data is a record of an organizational commitment to fairness and to excellence, in practice: not declared, not aspired to, but demonstrated through the work, search by search. Because exceptional leaders are out there. The question is whether the search is good enough to find them.

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Build a better search. Gain better outcomes.

If you are asking whether your current search process is built to find the best candidates or just the most available ones, that question is worth taking seriously. The Edgility Search team is experienced at working with boards and executive teams to run searches that are rigorous, transparent, and built to find the strongest candidate in the field. Our is here to do things differently. If you’re ready to say goodbye to a typical approach, reach out to get the conversation started.