S2E5 - Chris Johnson, Artisanal Talent Group - Working with Executive Recruiters

Chris Johnson is Co-founder & Managing Partner of Artisanal Talent Group, a highly specialized boutique executive search firm known for building some of tech’s most talented executive teams. Chris leads the Product and Engineering Leaders Practice, and is one of the most highly sought-after search consultants in the field for these critical roles at tier-1, high profile, VC backed and public companies. Over the past few years, Chris has completed Product and Engineering searches for Rippling, Notion, Rubrik, Airtable, ServiceNow, Databricks, Figma, UiPath, Confluent, Mulesoft, Starburst, GitLab, Splunk, Harness, New Relic, Elastic, dbt Labs, MessageBird, Postman, Coalition, Loom, Pendo, Procore, etc.

Key Highlights:

In this episode, Chris shares deep insights on how executive recruiters work and how to work with them. He also shares advice on how to be deliberate and thoughtful about mapping your career journey. 

* Case Study of a CPO Search
* How do accomplished executive candidates stand out
* Hiring trends - FAANG candidates, Domain relevance
* Are you a wartime or peacetime leader
* Does a company really need a CPO
* How recruiters assess candidates for "fit"
* How can candidates craft a strong narrative about themselves
* How to balance the use of "I" vs "We" in interviews
* How to talk about weak spots on the resume
* How to build relationships with exec recruiters
* Are you playing Career Chess or Checkers
* Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in exec searches
* How recruiters think about exceptions to the job spec

Connect with Chris Johnson:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjartisanal/

Connect with Rahul Abhyankar:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulabhyankar

Referenced in this episode:

- Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack
- Parker Conrad, CEO of Rippling
- Eisar Lipkovitz, CPO of Rippling
- CJ Desai, President of ServiceNow and COO