EXECUTIVE SEARCH

Put simply, we help you identify, hire and on-board Talent that is EVOLUTIONARY for your business

"Evolutionary" Talent is the key. We bring clients the Talent to help them evolve and stay ahead of the ever changing curves of media and technology and work to ensure they avoid the classic mistakes made because of carelessness, shortage of time or lack of a thorough internal investigation -- the "stationary hire" and the "revolutionary hire."

To do so, we work as partners with our clients to truly understand who they are, where they want to go and at what rate of change they can move, as to bring them Talent solutions that will impact both their success today and their success tomorrow. We get "in deep" as to know your needs, culture and business, so we can serve as true extensions of your recruitment function and representatives of your brand.

On the Candidate-side, and as another way to help those we work with evolve, we offer skill-mapping and career counseling as to help ensure that the right people, get to the right place in the right role.

Our core business covers the rather wide, but interconnected, range of Marketing, Content & Entertainment and our sweet-spots live within creative, digital (all types of makers, UX, design, social, etc.), strategy and media & measurement. We purposely live in the center of this fabulously dynamic three-ring Venn Diagram because all of our clients are trying to do the same things:

create compelling content
craft connected brand experiences
engage consumers as to create advocacy, relevance and a relationship of value
use data to gain a competitive advantage

Therefore, we can bring learning, context and, most importantly, better solutions from both inside and outside your expected talent markets.

Let's Talk Talent

COACHING

Leadership Insight, Starting With Self-Insight

Every leader has real strengths. The best leaders know exactly where those strengths are quietly working against them.

Start With Strengths

Every leader carries a collection of strengths that run in parallel — confidence, empathy, assertiveness, optimism, resilience. None of them exist in isolation. They move together, and they move at different speeds.

When One Strength Outruns Another

Strengths don’t grow at the same rate. When one strength outpaces another — confidence outrunning self-awareness, empathy outrunning assertiveness, optimism outrunning reality testing — it creates a gap.

I call that gap the shadow. The farther one strength outruns another, the longer the shadow gets.

Where Shadows Turn Into Derailers

Left unseen, a shadow doesn’t stay quiet. It shows up as behavior — the confident leader who stops hearing pushback, the empathetic leader who can’t hold a hard line, the optimist who stops seeing risk clearly. These are the patterns that derail careers that were, by every other measure, built to succeed.

Most leaders never see it coming. Not because they lack the insight to look — but because the strength itself is what’s casting the shadow, and it’s hard to see past your own light.

Access, Not Capacity

Here’s what I’ve learned running assessments for two decades: a score is a snapshot, not a ceiling. It reflects what’s accessible to someone right now — not the limit of what they’re capable of.

That distinction changes everything about how coaching should work. The work isn’t building capacity that isn’t there. It’s building access to capacity that already is.

That’s coach-create solutions — coaching built to close the distance between what a leader already has and what they can actually reach.

EQ-i Assessment

I use the EQ-i 2.0 — the world’s leading validated measure of emotional intelligence — as the starting map for this work.

How We Work Together

Coaching starts with a clear picture of where your shadow currently falls, then moves into a working partnership to close it — session by session, building habits that hold under real pressure, not just in the room with me.

Ready to bring some light to where the shadow has settled?

Seth Wolk | Seth.Wolk@redwagonexecsearch.com | 646.361.6961

CLIENTS

TEAM

SETH WOLK, Principal

23 Years of Talent Leadership

Seth Wolk has a deep passion for Talent and has helped creative, professional services and content companies win through the attraction, retention and development of their Talent for 23 years. He’s done this across a wide range of structures, sizes and scopes—at the holding company level for WPP and EMI, globally for JWT, and across regions and within offices for Saatchi, Translation, Publishers Clearinghouse and BBDO. Seth believes deeply that every chance to hire brings the opportunity to add capability, fuel momentum and evolve the offering. Accordingly, he works tirelessly to ensure that the right fit is made, both for the company and the candidate, so that these goals can be met.

An H.R. professional by training, he has led and has significant experience in addition to recruitment, within the areas of compensation, benefits, training & development, performance management and legal & compliance.

Background

Seth has a B.A. in Behavioral Psychology from Washington University and an M.B.A. with a concentration in Human Resource Management from S.U.N.Y Buffalo.

Beyond the Office

A native New Yorker, Seth currently splits his time between NYC and Chicago, claiming that his add of the Windy City in late 2013, was done for the weather. When not in hot pursuit of talent, he likes to brag about his hundreds of Springsteen shows, his trips to North Korea and Everest Base Camp, his many ill-fated long distance runs and his Chi-terrier rescue dog, Harrison, who (prior to adoption) survived being hit by a car.

REVIEWS

"combines the rare incisive ability to read people and separate what they need from what they want, with a gift for communicating and directing people with motivating clarity. He excels at building leadership teams and creating a dynamic in those teams that produces outstanding results"

— Management Consultant, Founder, and CMO

"key strategic partner within our management... Because of his ability to understand and represent the business...a highly effective recruiter of great talent"

— CEO and Strategy Advisor

"a talent and people guru; also fundamentally understands what great marketing and advertising is, and how to advance a company vision, which is a pretty rare mix in my years in this business"

— CMO @Pinterest

"the privilege of working with him and seeing something that I haven't seen before in my career, his incredible way of tapping into top talent, to find the right people the agency needs to achieve their goals"

— Global CCO at McCann

"working closely with Seth changed my perception of talent management. He genuinely cares about people, their growth and development, and how the company and the employee can mutually benefit from working together. Seth is skilled at finding and engaging top tier talent"

— CMO, Illumination Studios

"As an executive search partner, he knows the corporate business, brand and culture in a way that ensures genuine team fit, not just role fit... His judgment and authenticity earn immediate credibility. I cannot recommend Seth highly enough to any organization seeking a multi-faceted strategic talent partner."

— CEO, Bailey Lauerman

"What has always stood out about Seth is that he thinks differently. He's creative, resourceful, and an incredible hustler in the best sense of the word... When we engaged Red Wagon to lead our search for a VP of People at ITV, he built an incredibly strong and diverse pipeline of candidates, giving us real choices rather than simply filling a slate. I'd happily work with him again and highly recommend him to anyone looking for a search partner who will think outside the box and go the extra mile to find exceptional talent."

— Chief People Officer, ITV America

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