The Recruiter Who Went Rogue for Women in the C-Suite

For twenty years, Tracy Saunders sat on the other side of the table. She recruited executives for Google, Amazon and Cisco, ran complex hiring initiatives, and spoke with thousands of candidates. Somewhere in those thousands of conversations she kept noticing the same thing: qualified women, at the top of their fields, talking themselves out of the room. Underpricing themselves. Waiting to be picked. In 2019 she stopped placing candidates for companies and started building a company for the candidates. It is called BossmakeHer, and its entire premise is that senior women don't have a talent problem - they have a leverage problem.

BossmakeHer is a career-shifting company for women at the Director level through the C-suite. It bundles the things those women were previously piecing together on their own - career strategy, personal branding, LinkedIn positioning, interview prep, salary negotiation - and wraps them around one asset that is genuinely hard to find: a confidential network that introduces vetted executive women directly to companies, outside the job boards and outside the recruiter pipeline they know so well.

01The pattern she couldn't unsee

Saunders' background is the whole story. Two decades recruiting for firms most people spend their careers trying to get into gave her an unusually clear view of how executive hiring actually works - who gets referred, who gets shortlisted, and how the final number on an offer letter really gets set. She earned an Executive Certification in Strategic Diversity and Inclusion Management from Georgetown in 2019, but the sharper credential is the pattern recognition. She watched the mechanics of the so-called "old boys' club" up close and reached an unglamorous conclusion: it was never a conspiracy. It was a referral network. So she decided to build one for women.

The concept first went public as a pitch at Pittsburgh's AlphaLab accelerator, where Saunders met her co-founder, Paul-Bradley Slay. The company launched in October 2019 with a deliberately narrow promise - connect women executives to strategic opportunities outside of mass networking sites and job boards, discreetly.

What makes the origin credible is that Saunders isn't a coach who read about hiring. She is a recruiter who did it, at scale, for the companies that set the market. When she tells a member that a title is negotiable, or that a hiring manager will move on comp for the right candidate, she is describing rooms she has actually been in. That is the thing most career advice can't buy: not motivation, but inside knowledge of how the decision really gets made.

"We didn't start with a big company. We started with an idea and a problem we believed was worth solving." Tracy Saunders, Founder & CEO

02The numbers behind the mission

BossmakeHer didn't invent the problem it sells against; it just refuses to round it up. By the company's own framing, only about 26% of senior leadership roles are held by women, and only about 4% are held by women of color. Those two figures are the axis the entire product spins around - every coaching call, every branded profile, every quiet introduction is aimed at moving them.

03What you actually buy

The service reads less like a coaching subscription and more like a campaign with stages. A member arrives usually already senior, often quietly unhappy - underpaid, overqualified, or stuck somewhere the culture has gone toxic. BossmakeHer runs them through a roadmap that turns a vague "I think I could do better" into a signed offer letter with a bigger number on it.

Around that spine sits a private peer community, plus guest experts on things career coaching usually skips entirely - workplace safety, trauma, and how to job-hunt in secret while still showing up to a job you're trying to leave. On the other side of the marketplace, the company also does DEI consulting, helping employers hire and retain the exact women it coaches. That is the tidy part of the model: it works both the supply and the demand.

The business runs on programs and membership rather than hourly billing, which matters more than it sounds. Hourly coaching caps out at the coach's calendar; packaged outcomes and a curated community scale with content and relationships instead. A member isn't paying for an afternoon of advice, she's paying for a system - and for access to a room of women who have already made the move she's about to make. Behind the front door sits a team of roughly two dozen people, including resume and branding specialists and client-strategy leads, so the roadmap isn't one founder's personal calendar dressed up as a company.

"It's shattering barriers created by the 'old boys club' to create a powerful networking community designed to drive equity." BossmakeHer, on why the network is confidential

04Does it work? The receipts

Members describe the kind of outcomes that make the pitch easy. One reported getting $5,000 over her initial ask and crossing six figures above her old salary. Another reported multiple offers in under 90 days, a doubled salary, and an exit from a toxic environment. Results vary - they always do - but the throughline is consistent: the wins are less about finding a hidden job and more about asking for the right number, out loud, with backup.

It helps to be specific about who this is for, because the promise falls apart if you aim it wrong. This is not an early-career job-hunt tool and it is not a resume mill. The typical member is already accomplished - a Director, VP or C-suite leader whose problem isn't getting a job but getting the right one, at the right level, for the right money, without tipping off a current employer. For that person the confidential network is the whole point: she can explore without publicly signaling she's on the market, which at the executive level is a real and expensive risk.

05Where it fits in the market

BossmakeHer sits in the seam between three large, established categories: executive search, career coaching, and professional networking. Executive search firms work for the employer. Career coaches mostly sell advice by the hour. Networking platforms like LinkedIn are public by design. BossmakeHer's wedge is that it works for the candidate, packages the advice into outcomes, and keeps the network private. Its nearest neighbors are women-focused leadership communities such as Chief and The Mom Project - but few of them fuse the coaching, the branding and the confidential introductions into a single track.

The trajectory backs the positioning. What began as a Pittsburgh accelerator pitch grew into a national, multimillion-dollar company. Along the way Saunders raised a $50,000 convertible note in mid-2023 as part of a seed round, won The Fourth Floor's quarterly pitch competition, joined the Forbes Coaches Council, and was named to USA Today's list of top coaches and consultants of 2023. As the company grew, it started reinvesting locally - by 2026 it was sponsoring youth athletics back in the Pittsburgh community it started in.

"BossmakeHer exists because women have spent decades figuring out how to make all of this work." Tracy Saunders, Founder & CEO

06The honest caveats

This is a young, founder-led company, not an institution. Public funding to date is modest - roughly $150,000, largely on convertible notes - and the "multimillion-dollar" language describes revenue rather than a valuation anyone has published. The confidential-network model is powerful but human-scaled: it depends on real introductions and curated relationships, which is exactly what makes it hard to fake and hard to mass-produce at once. And like any coaching outcome, the member wins are self-reported. What's not in dispute is the shape of the bet: that senior women lose more to underselling than to under-qualifying, and that fixing the first is a business worth building. The category is crowded with people who will coach your mindset; far fewer will hand you a warm introduction and a script for the salary conversation. That combination is the moat, and it's a narrow one on purpose.

What can a reader take from it, even if they never buy? The reframe travels. Treat your next move as a campaign, not an application. Build the brand before you need it. Find the people who make introductions and be worth introducing. And when the offer comes, say the number out loud. BossmakeHer just sells the version of that with a coach, a community, and a Rolodex attached.