Yarmouth, Maine · Since 1994 · Certified Predictive Index Partner
Every service we offer was designed with a single purpose: to help organizations build the talent architecture needed to turn great strategy into measurable results.
Most organizations have a strategy. Very few have the talent architecture to execute it. The distance between what leadership intends and what the organization delivers is almost always a people problem.
Pemberton & Associates was redesigned from the ground up to close that gap. Our three practice areas form a coordinated system. Each one addresses a different aspect of the same challenge: getting the right people in the right seats, aligned to the right objectives, within a structure built to let them win.
The products and services inside are available individually or in combination, each one an investment in closing the distance between your strategy and its execution.
"Ted Pemberton founded this firm in 1994 with a simple conviction: that small and mid-market organizations deserve talent counsel as strategic, rigorous, and personal as anything available to large enterprises. He had built HR from the ground up inside a publicly traded bank, led the function through rapid growth, and understood what the right person in the right role actually meant to an organization's trajectory. When the opportunity came, he wrote his own package and set up shop.
Thirty years later, that conviction is still the one. What has changed is the environment, and the urgency that comes with it. The pace of change is creating talent gaps faster than most organizations can respond to them. AI is widening the distance between exceptional talent and everyone else. The organizations that get ahead of that curve will pull away from those that don't.
We've been fortunate to work alongside some remarkable organizations on that journey, and we don't take a single one of those relationships for granted. This next chapter is built on everything those partnerships taught us."
A misaligned executive hire does not just underperform. It compounds. Poor fit, mismatched expectations, and unclear objectives erode momentum at the exact moment an organization needs it most.
Our search process is built differently. We begin with outcomes, not job descriptions. We learn your organization before we approach a single candidate. And when we engage top talent, we do it as authentic advocates, telling your story compellingly because we know it deeply. The result is a process that identifies more precisely, attracts more effectively, and sets every new leader up for long-term impact.
We work with your search committee to identify and rank the 3 to 4 outcomes that define success, including how each will be measured, before a single name enters the process.
We identify who is producing the best results in the market for your specific objectives. From there we determine who is most responsible for driving those results. We find the right person, not just the right title.
We assess how each candidate contributed to their results, which levers they pulled and how, evaluating those methods against your specific challenges, culture, and constraints. Our searches also leverage insights from the Predictive Index behavioral assessment.
We learn how work actually gets done inside your organization: culture, operating dynamics, current challenges, strategic inflection points, so we assess candidates against reality, not a description.
The best candidates are succeeding where they are. They have to be moved. We engage top talent as genuine advocates for your organization, not as transactional recruiters.
When you need executive capability before the permanent hire is in place, we place proven operators who move the needle immediately while the long-term solution is built.
Define & rank the top 3 to 4 role objectives and success metrics with your search committee.
Learn culture, operating dynamics, challenges, and strategic context — the full picture.
Identify who is producing the best results against your objectives and trace true accountability.
Engage top talent as authentic brand ambassadors — compelling passive candidates with your story.
Assess lever-pulling, fit, and contribution. Present a slate built for long-term impact.
Approximately 20% of positions in any organization drive roughly 80% of its outcomes. THEO is built on that premise. Rather than waiting for critical roles to open and reacting under pressure, THEO gives organizations a curated, continuously managed talent portfolio. The goal is simple: the right people available before a seat goes empty.
THEO is a subscription product structured around multi-year contracts. It combines ongoing market intelligence, proactive pipeline management, real-time opportunity monitoring, and both retained and contingency search, within a single integrated engagement that delivers compounding value over time.
We monitor top performers at competitor organizations in real time, tracking who wants to move, why, where, and when. You receive talent intelligence most organizations never have access to.
We build a bespoke talent portfolio organized around your most critical positions. Portfolios are reviewed and rebalanced quarterly to stay aligned with shifting strategic priorities and open requisitions.
When a top prospect in your portfolio becomes open to new opportunities, you are notified immediately, giving you access before the broader market does.
Each month we provide ranked recommendations from your portfolio matched against current requisitions and strategic priorities, so every hiring decision is grounded in the best available talent.
We deliver regular reporting on portfolio depth, placement outcomes, and talent market trends, giving you the visibility to measure the return on your talent investment directly.
Every THEO contract includes at least five objective-defined retained searches executed using our full Practice I methodology, amplified by portfolio intelligence for faster and sharper outcomes.
All contracted retained searches are executed using our full executive search methodology: objective-defined, data-driven, with deep vetting and strategic attraction included in every engagement.
Portfolio prospects can be activated and hired on a contingency basis at any time, with volume discounts that improve economics as the relationship matures, making every successive hire more efficient than the last.
Every organization has a talent management system. It is the architecture that sits between strategic intent and financial performance, and most organizations have never assessed it with any real rigor.
The Talent Architecture Diagnostic was built from two things most firms in this industry never had in the same room: thirty years of direct observation of how talent systems succeed and fail across industries, and the financial and audit discipline to evaluate practices that directly and significantly impact financial performance. That intersection is what makes it diagnostic rather than descriptive. It does not just identify what is broken. It maps cause and effect, tracing which failure is driving the others and what to fix first to produce the most leverage.
A structured assessment across eight interconnected dimensions. Organizations may engage the full diagnostic or individual dimensions based on current strategic priorities.
Every deficiency is ranked by causal impact, not surface severity. The roadmap enforces dependencies so the right problems are addressed in the right order.
Advisory engagements extend the diagnostic into implementation, providing ongoing strategic counsel as organizations close gaps and build the talent architecture their strategy demands.
A firm intentionally designed around one problem.
We did not assemble a menu of HR services. We built a practice around a specific thesis: that the gap between strategy and execution is a talent architecture problem. Every offering is designed to address a different dimension of it.
Search, THEO, and the Assessment are not separate offerings. They are a coordinated system. Each one addresses a different point at which most organizations lose ground between strategy and execution.
Our search process begins with objectives and success metrics. Our Assessment ranks findings by impact. Our THEO portfolios rebalance against strategic priorities. Everything we do is oriented toward measurable results.
The longer we work with a client, the sharper our understanding of their culture, objectives, and talent needs. Our market intelligence deepens alongside it. Our model is built to compound in value as the relationship matures.
Founded by Ted Pemberton in 1994, we've completed over 500+ searches for financial services, healthcare, legal, nonprofit, and professional services organizations across New England and nationally. As a preferred partner for TD Bank, we recruited hundreds of positions as they scaled to a top-10 bank with over $300B in assets. It remains one of the longest and most productive client relationships in our firm's history.
Today we partner with the region's most respected organizations that hold us to a high standard because they understand what the right hire actually means. We are second-generation, family-owned, and built to stay that way.
When Susan Pemberton, CPA, CIA joined the practice, she brought something the executive search industry rarely sees: a top-down, financially grounded perspective on talent. Where most search professionals start with the role, Susan starts with the organization: its performance, its structure, and the gap between what leadership intends and what the workforce is actually delivering. Her background in finance, audit, and human resources gave her a lens that executive search has largely never thought to look for: the ability to evaluate talent the way a CFO evaluates capital, and to make the case for why it belongs at the center of executive decision-making, not at the edge of it.
Today she leads CxO and key finance searches and serves as the firm's lead on Talent Architecture Diagnostic™ engagements. A practice that finally gives boards and executives a rigorous answer to the question they've always had but never been able to ask properly: what is our workforce actually worth, and are we getting the return on our talent investment that our strategy requires?
Andrew specializes in financial services executive search, advising community and regional banks, credit unions, CUSOs, wealth and investment firms, and fintech organizations across the United States. He partners with leadership teams to identify and secure top talent across critical functions: commercial lending, retail banking, and wealth management.
What distinguishes Andrew's practice is the lens he brings to it. A graduate-level background in psychology and behavioral analysis means he does not simply evaluate candidates against a job description. He studies how they think, what motivates them, and how they are likely to perform under the specific pressures of your organization. Most search professionals can tell you what a candidate has done. Andrew can tell you how they did it.
The result is a quality of finalist presentation that goes well beyond a résumé review or a phone screen, giving search committees genuine confidence before an offer is ever extended.
Clients past and present: a diverse portfolio spanning financial services, healthcare, education, nonprofit, legal, manufacturing, and technology, built over three decades across New England and beyond.
Whether you are looking to make a transformative executive hire, build a proactive talent pipeline, or understand what is standing between your strategy and its execution, we would welcome the conversation.