Vaco Acquires Bay State Search
November 5, 2021 – Brentwood, TN-headquartered recruiting firm Vaco has acquired Bay State Search, a Boston-based national talent acquisition and outsourcing firm. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal gives Vaco a foothold into the Boston market and complements its Northeast growth, following the launch of its technology and staffing divisions in the tri-state area last year.
Bay State Search, founded in 2013, serves the accounting and finance, banking and financial services, information technology, customer service, legal work and administration sectors. The transaction closed Oct. 29; terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Bay State Search will transition to the Vaco brand in 2022, and its executives will remain with the company. Vaco said it has been looking at Boston for a long time. “Once we met [Ryan Murphy, principal and founder of Bay State Search] and the Bay State Search team, we knew we’d found the right partners,” said Vaco CEO and co-founder Brian Waller. “Like Vaco, Bay State Search puts people and relationships first, and this is the perfect partnership to bring more value to both clients and candidates in the Boston market.”
Founded in 2002 by Jerry Bostelman, Jay Hollomon and Mr. Waller, Vaco provides boutique-level service with global reach in executive search, consulting, permanent placement and strategic staffing. Its areas of expertise include accounting, finance, technology, healthcare IT, operations, administration and managed services. The firm operates more than 35 offices, with 780-plus employees and 4,300 consultants worldwide.
This follows Focus Search Partners, a Vaco company, acquiring Dallas-based Southerland Group, complementing its existing expertise across the healthcare industry. Southerland Group is a nationally recognized retained executive search firm with specialization in complex integrated delivery systems, hospitals, academic medical centers, children’s hospitals and payer organizations.
Related: Vaco Opens New Office in Vancouver
Under the agreement, Southerland Group’s founder Keith Southerland and his team joins Focus Search Partners’ leadership team. Mr. Southerland brings more than three decades of experience leading executive search for healthcare provider organizations to the firm and has conducted more than 1,100 searches for non-profit multi-hospital health systems, professional associations, pediatric health systems, public hospitals, academic medical centers and managed care organizations.
Data Privacy Solutions
Last month, Vaco and Nymion, a Montréal-based data privacy firm, launched a strategic partnership to offer premium data privacy solutions to clients, enabling adherence to stringent consumer protection legislation in Montréal and across Québec.
The partnership offers a variety of solutions for data privacy and data security for stronger consumer protection under Québec’s Bill 64, which requires the public and private sectors to modernize personal information and privacy rights – and aligns the province with other Canadian data privacy laws – giving citizens full control of their personal information. Organizations violating this new policy could face fines of up to $25 million.
“Canadian companies are falling behind in data privacy,” said Sean Bartunek, managing partner of Vaco in Montréal. “Vaco’s partnership with Nymion empowers our clients with a robust end-to-end solution that will protect their employee and customer data with the very best talent and technology on the market.”
Under the partnership, Vaco (and Vaco’s consulting firm, MorganFranklin Consulting) and Nymion offer turnkey “cradle-to-compliance” data privacy strategies, technologies and delivery solutions including: compliance assessments and audits, architectural IT designs, and deployments and integrations.
Vaco began its global reach into Canada in 2017 when it acquired Lannick, a Toronto-based premier professional recruiting and consulting firm. In 2019, Vaco launched its Montréal presence, followed in 2020 by its acquisition of Toronto-based Prodigy Bank, one of Canada’s fastest-growing technology talent firms, and the opening of its Vancouver office.
Vaco’s Montréal office provides expertise in the areas of accounting and finance, technology and operations.
Related: H.I.G. Capital Acquires Oxford Global Resources
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
