Retained Executive Search
Clinical Directors and above — filled, not chased.
The senior clinical seats — Clinical Director, Regional Clinical Director, VP Clinical, Chief Clinical Officer — are the hardest roles in ABA to fill. The candidates you need are employed, not searching, and the stakes of a wrong hire are org-defining. That is exactly the search retained is built for.
Why retained — and why us
Retained vs. contingency
Contingency recruiters race each other to spam the same active candidates. For senior clinical roles, the person you actually want is running a program somewhere else right now — reaching them takes a committed, exclusive, research-driven search with your name carried properly into the market. That is retained. It is the only way we have ever worked: every deal in our history is retained; zero contingency.
Our unfair advantage
Fifteen years serving the behavior-analytic community means we hold the field’s deepest proprietary network of clinical professionals — and the relationships to make a quiet, credible approach to leaders who would never answer a job ad. Karen Chung ran a retained executive-search practice before founding Special Learning; this is her craft, applied to the field she knows best.
How a search runs
- Scoping. A working session on the role, the org, compensation reality, and what “great” means for you. We tell you plainly if we should not take the search.
- Market map. We enumerate the real candidate universe for the role — by name — before anyone is approached.
- Sourcing & approach. Quiet, direct, credible outreach from people the field already knows. Passive candidates take our calls.
- Assessment. A clinical-leadership rubric — not vibes. Clinical depth, people leadership, operational judgment, values fit.
- Shortlist & cadence. A small slate of genuinely qualified, genuinely interested finalists, with structured client check-ins through offer.
- Close & guarantee. We run the offer and the close, and every placement carries a replacement guarantee. It has never been needed.
What we take — and what we decline
Clinical Director and above, only. We do not run RBT or BCBA placement searches — at staff level, training the team you can hire locally beats paying anyone to chase the same candidate pool, and we will tell you so. If your need is staff-level capacity, start with the Training Partner Program instead; if it is a leadership seat, book the call.
What it costs
Retained search is a staged professional engagement, scoped to the role and market — not a one-size fee off a rate card. Karen will give you the exact structure and number on the scoping call, and you will leave that call knowing precisely what you would get and when.
Bring Karen the seat you cannot fill.
A 20-minute scoping call, directly with the person who will run your search. No handoffs to a junior associate — there are none.