Y Scouts

As CEO of Y Scouts, I highlight the connection between purpose and leadership in the recruiting process to transform how people and companies connect through a shared sense of purpose. Over the past 9 years, my efforts have brought this conversation to the forefront in the boardrooms of some of the most highly respected companies across the country.

I’m proud to lead a team of fully-committed recruiting and leadership development experts who find and hire exceptional, deeply-aligned leaders.

Founder and CEO 

Prevail Recruiting

Co-Founder

TruPath Search (formerly Job Brokers, Inc.)

Started my own business with another co-founder called Job Brokers, Inc. which we rebranded to TruPath Search. We offered a full range of recruiting services including: Retained search, executive search, contingent search, contract, contract to hire, direct placement and a full array of research recruitment and market intelligence information gathering.

Grew to over $50M in revenue with clients like University of Phoenix, Goodrich, OMCO Solar, and others.

CEO and Founder

HUNTER Technical - htrjobs.com

In charge of getting new businesses and build sales pipeline for the recruiting team.

Account Manager

Aerotek

Learned from the best on how to recruit great talent in telecomm through seamless operations, professional development, and skills assessment.

Recruiter

CEO | We Find Purpose Driven Executives For Value Aligned Companies

I’m on a mission to change how we hire leaders in this country. Our employees and customers deserve to work with executives who are aligned on the values and the mission of the company, as well as being highly capable. 

The traditional hiring system is broken. Job boards and AI have created an unholy mess of the recruitment process and no one is winning. Candidates are anxious and over-applying, employers are drowning in applications and paralyzed by choice. 

At Y Scouts, we lead with purpose. We don’t advertise roles — we use our covert discovery process to handpick outstanding candidates for your leadership role. We obsess about 3 key characteristics: 

- Relentless learning
- Developing others
- Delivering results

If a candidate has all 3, they fit our Leadership Model and only then do we progress to assessing their experience and capabilities. We look for soft skills, culture alignment and an expectation of excellence.

My early career in recruiting started at Aerotek, one of the biggest aerospace recruiters in the country. A few years later, I started my own firm, Tru Path (formerly Job Brokers Inc.), a company that grew 100% year-over-year for eight years, scaling to $50 million in revenue. 

We hired over 50,000 people across many different industries. Churn was often high, and I realized that to drive real growth in a company's culture, you have to start at the top.

So in 2012, I co-founded Y Scouts, the world’s first purpose-driven executive search firm. We work with dozens of industries, from fashion to fitness, medicine to manufacturing. 

My philosophy is simple: hire like your business depends on it — because it does. 

Ready to find the leaders who are going to take your business further than you could have imagined? Let’s talk.

Choosing a business partner is like choosing a spouse. 
Most entrepreneurs don’t realize how high the stakes are until it’s too late.

I’ve been extremely lucky. My first business partner and I worked together for 13 years.

It worked because we were different.
I handled biz dev, he handled ops.
We didn’t plan that. We got along, took a chance, and it worked.

What I didn’t realize back then is that the dynamic between you builds the foundations of the business and shapes what happens every day.

Which is why your partner’s character outside of business matters as much as their skills inside it. 

How they are as a spouse, a parent, a friend — it all points to how they’ll be in business.

(Same goes for you.)

If you don’t see eye to eye on those things, you won’t trust their judgement. 

Agreeing on how to make decisions and what to prioritize is built on a foundation of shared beliefs and values. 

Without that alignment, things go sideways quickly. 

It’s easy to ignore this because it seems soft or outside the scope of the work.

But you can’t drive a mission when the founders are pulling in different directions. 

I’ve seen great partnerships thrive and others implode — and it almost always came down to alignment, not ability.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from a business partnership?

📸 Taking in a game with // Ryan Berry my biz partner at Prevail Recruiting.

Max Hansen

Talks about #hiring, #culture, #leadership, #recruitment, and #entrepreneurship

I help businesses find transformative leaders. CEO & Founder of Y Scouts (Forbes 2025 ‘America’s Best Executive Recruiting Firms’). We find qualified C-suite execs who are deeply aligned with your mission and culture.

I’ve hired over 50,000 people throughout my career…

The no. 1 lesson? 

Throwing more bodies at your culture problem will not fix it.

When I started my first recruitment company, we were usually hiring for departments with a lot of churn among the general staff.

The clients didn’t even realize they had a problem…

But I could see there were major issues upstream. 

The leadership was failing in one way or another, and I started to feel like we were making it worse. 

Providing a constant flow of fresh people (who we would then replace a few months later) forced me to reevaluate what we were delivering. 

If you’re constantly hiring for the same roles, you have to ask: 
Why? Why are people failing so frequently here?

Look close enough, and it’s almost always because something in the leadership is not working. 

That’s why I got so passionate about hiring leaders. 

I wanted to go hire the people at the source of the culture, not the people downstream, because that’s where I could make the biggest impact. 

Today, that’s one of the most gratifying parts of the job. 

Hiring the right leaders for the right seats creates a ripple effect unlike anything else I’ve seen in business. 

For the leaders themselves. For their direct reports. For the families of every employee. For the customers. For the vendors, and all their families. 

It’s not an overstatement to say that getting the right people into your 
business can create generational change — not to mention transforming your culture and bottom line. 

Who’s the next leader you need to hire to create this kind of change in your own business?

Trust is at an all-time low in hiring. Bad news if you're looking for your next leader. And after 50,000 hires? 

The patterns aren't just obvious. They're disturbing. And too many companies (and candidates) are getting burned because their process is so short on trust.

Here's what most talent teams miss: 

- Job descriptions are vague. Success outcomes are absent. 
- Any candidate worth their salt knows the basic questions to prepare for. 
- Most importantly, hiring managers don’t create an environment where candidates trust them enough to tell the truth. 

Here's the really uncomfortable part. 

These mistakes accidentally encourage candidates to talk a bigger game than they can actually play.

All this compounds to cost companies outrageous amounts of cash when a new hire goes wrong. It drives trust down even further and makes top talent hesitate to leave a comfortable role. 

So at Y Scouts, we stopped fighting human behavior and redesigned the process from the ground up: 

1. We target the specific people we want to talk to (no job boards): 
If the candidate isn’t looking for the job, they have no reason to embellish anything. 

2. Interview for proof, not hypotheticals: 
We constantly knock people back on track when they start talking hypothetically. We only want to know about specific, lived experiences and attitudes. 

3. Build trust from the first conversation: 
Show up as a human first, recruiter second. Sharing something meaningful to you helps candidates take their own mask off. 

If you want honesty, create a process that encourages honesty.

If you’re hiring right now, this is for you.

Our new Role Visioning tool has been extremely well received by our first beta testers. 

It's designed to help you find the right leader who's aligned with your company's core values, and has the exact skills and experience to succeed in the role.

Most hiring teams tell us it cuts days of screening and surfaces talent they would never have reached.

I still want to get more 'real world' feedback on the tool as quickly as possible.

So I'm opening up something we’ve never offered before: 

A free opportunity profile you can use for your job listing immediately, AND an ideal candidate profile you can use to hire the right person quickly.

Not a demo. Not a sample. A real, fully curated profile you can take to market right away, for free.

No subscription. No commitment. Just real clarity that every stakeholder can agree on.

If you are hiring, you can claim it here: https://lnkd.in/g8gReDPj

All I ask is that you share your thoughts about the experience when you're done.
I’d love to see which role you choose to test it on.

Most executives are selling the wrong thing.
They lead with their title, instead of the only thing the market actually buys: 

Impact. In 25 years in this business, I’ve never seen an exception.

If you open with:

“I was the VP of…”
“I led a division of…”

Here’s an uncomfortable fact: 

The market doesn’t care what you were called.
It cares what you changed.

Your title has never gotten you hired. Only your results. This is why so many senior leaders keep losing out to less experienced candidates who can articulate their impact better.

When you strip away the fancy titles, most people struggle to talk about the real growth levers of leadership:

What they built

What they fixed

What they scaled

What broke — and how they handled it

How the business was different because of them

They’ll tell you their scope.
They’ll tell you their responsibilities.
But they won’t tell you their impact.

And that’s the gap.

Because when companies hire senior leaders, they’re not buying a résumé.
They’re buying evidence.

Evidence that you made hard decisions.
Evidence that you hired the right people — and removed the wrong ones.
Evidence that you drove outcomes, not activity.

Your title might get you a meeting.
Your impact gets you the offer.

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