Executive Talent, Confidentially

The private market for verified leaders earning $150K+. Stay visible to the right companies without signaling the market. Every candidate personally reviewed by Mike Torchinsky. You decide who gets your contact details.

How It Works

Upload your CV. Our AI creates an anonymous profile card. Mike Torchinsky personally reviews and endorses your profile. We promote anonymized profiles to a network of 70,000+ executives. Companies request introductions. You decide who gets your details.

Why TOPHEADS

Anonymous by default. Personal curation by an executive recruiter with 25+ years of experience. No placement commissions. Your data is protected and your identity stays private until you choose to share it.

For Candidates

Whether you are actively looking or simply want to be findable to the right opportunities, TOPHEADS is the private market for senior executives. Our two tiers — TOPHEADS ($150K-$199K) and Select ($200K+) — offer different levels of personal endorsement and visibility.

For Companies

Access pre-vetted senior executive candidates. During Early Access (until Fall 2026), full platform access is free for hiring companies. Send introduction requests, search by industry and region, and find candidates who match your specific needs.

Notes

Short-form intelligence and observations on executive search, leadership hiring, and the private talent market. Written by Mike Torchinsky.

Field Notes

On-the-ground dispatches from executive search — real patterns, real market signals, and unfiltered observations from active searches across industries and geographies.

On The Record

Candid conversations with senior executives and hiring leaders. What they really look for, how they think about talent, and what it takes to land at the top.

Career Quiz

Find out which executive tier you belong in. Answer a few questions about your role, compensation, and career goals to see whether TOPHEADS or Select is the right fit for you.

About Mike Torchinsky

Mike Torchinsky is an executive search consultant with 25+ years of experience in placing senior leadership across financial services, technology, and professional services. He has built a network of 70,000+ executives on LinkedIn and personally vets every candidate on the TOPHEADS platform.

What the market requires from senior leaders

TOPHEADS Skill Check is a free benchmark of what companies actually require from executives — built from 39,337 real Director-and-above job postings, not surveys. For any of 62+ roles you can see the capabilities that define it, the hard and soft skills named most often, the scope expected (M&A, IPO, transformation), typical experience and a pay signal — and filter it all to your country, industry and company size.

It answers the question a senior leader actually asks: for the role I want next, what does the market expect — and where do I stand against it?

How to read the numbers

Capabilities

Each percentage is the share of postings for the role that call for a capability. The top capabilities are what most define the role; a high figure is near table-stakes, a lower one is more specialist. Skills from thousands of postings are mapped to a fixed set of executive capabilities so the picture is consistent and comparable across roles.

Scope signals

Skill Check also surfaces how often a role is expected to bring deal (M&A), capital-markets (IPO) or transformation experience — the kind of scope that separates strong executive candidates from solid functional ones.

Honest by design

Where a specific slice is too thin to be reliable, Skill Check widens it and tells you exactly what it widened. Every figure is grounded in real postings — never invented.

Frequently asked questions

What is an executive skill benchmark?

An executive skill benchmark shows what companies actually require for senior leadership roles — the capabilities, hard skills, scope of experience, and pay named most often in real job postings. It is used by leaders preparing for a move, planning development, or repositioning for a target role. TOPHEADS Skill Check covers the Director-and-above tier: CFO, CTO, CRO, COO, Chief Product Officer and 50+ other C-suite and VP roles.

What skills does a CFO need today?

Across real CFO postings, the capabilities required most are Strategic Leadership, Financial Acumen, Data & Analytics and Risk, Security & Compliance, alongside hard skills such as financial reporting, treasury and cash-flow management, FP&A and forecasting. Many CFO roles also expect M&A and transformation experience. Pick CFO in the tool above and filter by country, industry and company size to see the exact figures for your context.

How is Skill Check measured?

Every percentage is the share of real executive job postings for a given role (and, when filtered, country, industry, company size and seniority) whose requirements call for a capability or name a skill. Skills are mapped to a fixed set of executive capabilities so the picture is consistent across roles. Where a slice is too thin to be reliable, Skill Check widens it and tells you — it never shows a fabricated figure.

What does a capability percentage mean?

It is the proportion of postings for that role that ask for the capability — not a measure of how important it is. A capability at 80% is near table-stakes for the role; one at 20% is more specialist or context-dependent. Reading the top few capabilities tells you what most defines the role in the market right now.

Does the data vary by country, industry and company size?

Yes. The same role can look different by context — a CFO in Germany skews heavily toward transformation, while a CFO at a mega-cap weights risk and controls more. Country and the larger industries are well covered; some narrow industry and company-size slices are still filling in, and Skill Check widens those automatically and says so.

Is TOPHEADS Skill Check free?

Yes. The Skill Check explorer is completely free with no signup. TOPHEADS members additionally get a personal view — their own profile mirrored against this market data, showing their strengths and the gaps for the role they want. TOPHEADS monetizes through its executive recruitment platform, not through data access.

How often is the data updated?

Skill Check is built from a fresh collection of executive postings and refreshed each quarter. As new collections land, quarter-over-quarter movement — which capabilities are rising or fading — appears automatically.