Consilio (n.) — deliberate counsel; instructive guidance; prudent advice;
considered direction; earned insight; quiet authority; wisdom in service of others.
Design
leadership
placed well.
A design leadership network for AI and frontier tech companies — built on insider access, not traditional recruiting.
The Context
The most consequential design hires are the ones no one knows how to make.
When a company is building something genuinely new — not iterating on an existing pattern, but inventing the interaction model from scratch — the founding design hire isn't a staffing problem. It's a judgment problem.
The person who can do that work isn't looking. They're building. They don't have a resume optimized for your job description. They have a portfolio that requires someone who understands design deeply enough to read it correctly — and relationships that get a response when most outreach gets ignored.
That's a different kind of search. It requires a different kind of firm.
The Founder's Reality
"I know I need a design leader. I don't know how to evaluate one — especially for a product that doesn't have a comparable yet. I need someone who can tell me what great looks like before I've seen it."
The Market's Problem
Most recruiting firms evaluate candidates against a job description. For searches at the frontier — where the role has never existed and the right portfolio has no obvious category — that process produces confident wrong answers.
The Gap We Fill
We've spent years learning to recognize which designers can own a vision versus execute one. That distinction is invisible to a generalist. It's everything to a founding team.
What We Are
Not a recruiting firm.
A design leadership network.
The Consilio is what you get when the people who built and sourced design teams at Meta — who hired and mentored the designers who now lead at the world's best product companies — decide to do this work deliberately, at a small scale, for founders who deserve more than a resume dump.
We're opinionated. We advise. We tell founders when a profile isn't what their product needs — and when the search requires someone with a specific kind of craft that most recruiters wouldn't recognize in a portfolio. When we move, we move through relationships that took a decade to build.
A volume-based agency blasting your JD to a database of people who are "open to new opportunities"
A direct call to someone we've known for years — who takes the meeting because we're the ones asking
A recruiter who evaluates candidates against a job description they didn't help write
Someone who can read a portfolio and tell you whether a designer thinks in systems or just delivers screens — before you've spent a day in interviews
Generic interview coaching and comp benchmarks pulled from an industry survey
Founders who understand what great design leadership actually looks like — and can help you know it when you see it
The Approach
Three things no recruiting firm can offer. We offer all three.
Access
The designers doing the most interesting work right now aren't on job boards. They're building. We know them — through a decade of genuine relationships at the center of the industry. They respond to us because they trust us, not because we found them in a database.
Evaluation
We're design-native. We spent years at Meta identifying which designers had real systems thinking, which could own a product vision versus execute on one, and which would thrive in genuine ambiguity. We can tell you what you're looking at — and what you're not — before you've run a single interview.
Speed
Once we're aligned on a profile, we move. The relationships already exist. We're making a call to someone we've known for years — someone who trusts our read on a company and a founder. That's a different kind of speed than a search that starts from scratch.
We don't just find you a designer. We tell you what kind of designer your product actually needs — and why that distinction matters more than you think.
The Proof
Credentials that speak for themselves.
"He is the strongest, most effective, most passionate recruiter I have worked with in my career. He works as a true partner — taking the time to understand the needs of the business, and working alongside me and my team to make the right calls."
Margaret Gould Stewart — Designer, Advisor, Investor; Former VP of Design, Facebook
"For design leadership roles, I can't recommend him enough. Jeremy stood out in three ways — speed, approach, and follow-through. He was proactive in all aspects of the process, and that didn't stop when the contract was signed."
Charlie Sutton — Chief Design Officer, Atlassian
"It's easy to see that he's personally invested in each and every candidate he represents. Working with Jeremy means you have a friend looking out for you — someone who spares no effort to help you succeed."
Loredana Crisan — Chief Design Officer, Figma
"Jeremy is an exceptional recruiter because he genuinely cares about the people he works with. He earned my trust because he was prompt, engaging, caring, and respectful of my time. He is a true advocate."
Stephanie Cooper — Director of Product Design, Slack
at Meta under Jeremy's leadership
almost entirely from design leaders
probably looking for
The People
Built by insiders.
Run with intention.
Jeremy Loughnot
Founder Partnerships & Leadership Network
Eleven years at Meta, culminating as Chief of Staff for Global Recruiting & Workforce Planning — overseeing a team of 140 and shaping how Meta found and hired design talent at every level, from IC to VP.
Hired every Design Director and VP at Meta for years. Knows the difference between a candidate who looks great on paper and one who will actually lead — and can tell the difference between someone who executes a product vision and someone who authors one.
This is not a second career. This is a deliberate application of access and judgment built over a decade at the center of the industry.
Carl Wheatley
Design Community & Sourcing
A product designer who became a recruiter — which means Carl evaluates candidates the way a designer would, not the way a generalist does. He spent years at Meta hiring for design, AI/ML, and data science, building one of the most specific insider networks in the industry.
Co-founder of GlobalUXD, a design community of 15,000+ members. When Carl reaches out to a candidate, it's not cold — it's a message from someone they already know and trust.
Where Jeremy evaluates depth and trajectory, Carl maps the landscape and knows exactly who's ready to move — and why now is the right moment to have the conversation.
Together
Jeremy evaluates what others can't see. Carl moves through communities others can't access. That's the firm.
The Commitment
Deliberately small. Highly selective. Every engagement gets both of us — because that's the only way this works at the level we've set for it.
The Engagement Model
Selective by design.
Priced for the work it is.
Search
Founding Designer Placement
Retained · Custom fee
End-to-end placement of a company's first or most critical design hire. We start with profile alignment — making sure the criteria are right before we source — then move through our network to find the specific people worth a conversation.
- Profile definition & alignment
- Network-first sourcing only
- Portfolio review & evaluation support
- Founder coaching throughout
Advisory + Search
Design Leadership Architecture
Retained + Advisory · Custom rate
For companies building a design function from the ground up. We advise on structure, level, and sequencing — then place the people. This is the engagement most of our best clients eventually want.
- Design org structure advisory
- Leveling & compensation guidance
- Multi-role search execution
- Ongoing access to our evaluation lens
Advisory
Talent Strategy Consulting
Project-based · Custom rate
For VCs and founders who want our read on design talent, compensation benchmarks, or a specific hire — without a full retained search.
- Portfolio review & evaluation
- Design leader market mapping
- Compensation benchmarking
- Introductions within our network
We work with a small number of clients at a time. Every engagement is handled directly by Jeremy and Carl — not delegated to a junior team.
Get in Touch
The right hire changes the trajectory of a product.
We're not right for every search. But if you're building something at the frontier of AI and design — where the interaction model doesn't exist yet and the founding designer needs to invent it — we'd like to talk.
The conversation is always worth having. Especially before a role is officially open.
Contact
Jeremy Loughnot
jeremy@theconsil.io
Founder Partnerships & Leadership Network
Carl Wheatley
carl@theconsil.io
Design Community & Sourcing
theconsil.io"The trajectory of a product is determined by the leaders who design it. We take that seriously."
The Consilio — theconsil.io