Chief of Staff Recruiting

Omna Search specializes in placing Chiefs of Staff at startups and high-growth companies. We source candidates from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, top investment banks, and PE firms — professionals with the analytical rigor, executive presence, and operational range to serve as a CEO’s strategic right hand from day one.

The Chief of Staff role has become one of the most sought-after positions in the startup and tech ecosystem, and one of the hardest to hire for. It requires a rare combination of strategic thinking, operational execution, stakeholder management, and discretion. The best candidates often come from top-tier consulting, where they learned to structure ambiguous problems and drive cross-functional workstreams, or from investment banking and PE, where they developed financial rigor and deal experience. Omna has placed 200+ operators, with Chief of Staff as our most-requested role. We understand the nuances: the difference between a CoS at a 50-person startup vs. a 500-person scale-up, the comp benchmarks at each stage, and the personality traits that separate great Chiefs of Staff from merely good ones.

Chief of Staff is one of several business generalist roles we recruit for.

What we look for

• Structured problem-solving: Can they take an ambiguous mandate from the CEO and turn it into an actionable plan?
• Cross-functional influence: Can they drive alignment across engineering, sales, product, and finance without direct authority?
• GTM / Go-to-Market: Operators who build and optimize the revenue engine —from sales ops to market entry strategy.
• Operating adaptability: Are they comfortable with the pace, ambiguity, and resource constraints of a high-growth environment?

Why Omna

‍Omna was founded by ex-McKinsey consultants who saw a gap: companies needed elite operator talent, but traditional recruiters didn’t understand what “good” looked like in this category.

We built a firm — and a network of 2,000+ business generalists from MBB, top banks, and PE — specifically to solve this problem. We’ve completed 200+ placements across seed-stage startups to post-IPO companies. Our candidates come from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and leading PE firms — and we evaluate them on the qualities that matter for operating role success: adaptability, ownership, and the ability to operate in ambiguity