CIO hiring on the rise: How to land a top tech exec role in 2025

Early returns on 2025 hiring for IT leaders suggest a robust market. For some recruitment firms, job growth for tech executive positions is at great heights.

“We’re seeing record growth in our search firm almost immediately in 2025,” says Kelly Doyle, managing director at Heller Search Associates, an executive recruiting firm in Westborough, Mass., specializing in CIOs, CTOs, VP-level senior technology leaders, and executive technology talent. “This growth was anticipated, but it’s encouraging to see a spike in business.”

Typically, election years bring fear, uncertainty, and doubt, causing a slowdown in hiring, Doyle says. With the election over and a new calendar year under way, organizations and placement firms are experiencing an influx of searches, Doyle says. Especially in an era of growing emphasis on AI, organizations recognize that without the right technology leadership, they will face challenges ahead and are trying to ward off disadvantages now.

Sharing that optimism is Somer Hackley, CEO and executive recruiter at Distinguished Search, a retained executive search firm in Austin, Texas, focused on technology, product, data, and digital positions. Hackley sees widespread optimism around CIO hiring, with many CIOs reporting a significant uptick in executive recruiters reaching out to them over the past month compared to months prior.

But with the increase in opportunities come significant expectations on what a CIO or job candidate should bring to the table this year.

“Overall, successful CIOs in 2025 will need to balance technical expertise with business acumen, leadership, and a focus on data, AI, cybersecurity, and M&A integration. CIOs need to be the business and technology translator. The list of what a great CIO brings to the table keeps growing,” Hackley says.

Especially important: “We can’t talk about CIO hiring and not mention AI,” he stresses. “CIOs have shared that in every meeting, people are enamored with AI and gen AI. CIOs who bring real credibility to the conversation understand that AI is an output of a well architected, well managed, scalable set of data platforms, an operating model, and a governance model.”

The changing role of the CIO

There is little doubt that the CIO role in 2025 is evolving at a rapid pace, explains Kanani Breckenridge, CEO and ‘headhuntress’ at Kismet Search, a boutique recruitment service focusing on the San Diego technology sector and executive search. “AI adoption, IT outsourcing, and cybersecurity risks are fundamentally reshaping expectations. Boards and CEOs aren’t just looking for IT leaders. CIOs are being viewed as business strategists who can navigate AI’s impact, manage outsourced IT functions, and drive ROI and measurable business value,” she says.

Heller Search’s Doyle shares that assessment. “The top trend we’re looking for in CIOs is AI expertise. While not everyone fully understands AI, it’s clear that companies need strong technology leaders to navigate this landscape.”

Still, many organizations aren’t yet ready to fully take advantage of AI because they lack the foundational building blocks around data quality and governance. For those organizations, the hiring themes are all about productivity, efficiency, and service; democratizing data; and building the engines to leverage it, Distinguished Search’s Hackley explains.

“Companies are looking for CIOs with experience in building well-architected, scalable data platforms and robust governance, focusing on continuous improvement and measurable business results,” he says.

Skills needed to land a CIO role today

In terms of skills most in demand, CIOs need to have economic and financial sophistication, understanding the cost dynamics behind AI along with various cloud and SaaS environments, Hackley explains.

CIOs must be able to turn data into value, Doyle agrees. Most organizations are currently at the data integration, data governance, and data strategy level, so they need to hire the right CIO to advance those areas. For companies that have already been investing in data, architecture, and technology over the past few years, the focus is more on transformation of culture and business models.

Cybersecurity is also a huge focus for many organizations. Cloud transformation is not new, but as more assets move to the cloud, CIOs are needed who have experience with multi-cloud strategies for cost effectiveness and optimized systems.

“Cloud security and third-party risk is also a must, with bad actors becoming more sophisticated,” Hackley says.

In terms of management skills, organizations are looking for CIOs who have driven change management at scale, Hackley explains.

“It’s one thing to have a strategy or execute on a proof of concept, but large-scale execution is a whole other skill set,” Hackley says. “Some CIOs note that the technology change is easy. The organizational change management needed is the hard part of transformation. There is a trend for wanting CIOs with experience gaining buy-in, influencing, and driving things forward.”

On a personal level, CIOs are also grappling with a pragmatic challenge: how to transition into broader leadership roles such as CEO, Breckenridge explains. Unlike CFOs or COOs, CIOs have historically been seen as technical operators rather than business architects, leaving them vulnerable to being sidelined as AI takes over more traditional IT functions, she says.

Top markets for CIO candidates

While the overall hiring market for CIOs should be strong this year, some industries are especially promising.

Regulatory industries such as financial services and healthcare, as well as the energy sector, will see marked improvements in hiring for IT professionals of all stripes. Driving hiring demand are the advent of AI in cybersecurity, automation, communications tools, and cloud and data center infrastructure to accommodate large language model (LLM) development initiatives and related capacity resource needs and investments, explains Doug Wald, vice president of recruiting for North America at Executive Alliance, a full-service executive search firm in Commack, NY.

Wald’s picks for especially strong geographic markets include Seattle; the San Francisco Bay Area; greater New York metro; Charlotte, NC; Austin, Texas; Denver; Boston; and greater Washington DC; as well as burgeoning areas of development for new data centers accommodating AI development investments such as Scottsdale, Ariz.

To these picks, Breckenridge adds AI-native growth companies, security vendors, critical infrastructure firms, and government related or defense agencies.

What of the ‘Great CIO Migration’?

There had been speculation in 2024 that many CIOs were delaying job changes, but that we would see a “Great CIO Migration” in 2025. Breckenridge, for one, does not subscribe to that theory.

“The Great CIO Migration is not going to materialize for several reasons,” Breckenridge says. “First, most CIOs — as with a lot of tech and white collar workers — weren’t holding off on job changes due to lack of interest, but rather that there was very little movement, at the executive level in particular, unless they are brought on to fix a major issue or as a founder.”

Other reasons, Breckenridge says, include:

• M&A activity was slow in 2024. With fewer acquisitions and consolidations, there were fewer new leadership opportunities emerging at the C-level.
• High interest rates discouraged corporate restructuring. Many organizations froze executive hiring, and major IT projects, or delayed leadership transitions.
• There was a great deal of uncertainty around the CIO role in an AI-driven environment because of how it’s changing the IT landscape and needed IT functions.

“In a tougher market specifically, CIOs who are looking to change jobs need to be more strategic about career moves, prioritizing roles where they can prove things like owning AI monetization and businesstransformation (rather than just AI adoption), broaden their skillsets, and prove their ability to reduce costs and improve efficiencies — through technology, automation, or cloud computing,” Breckenridge says.

Pay and benefit opportunities for top talent

CIOs have typically enjoyed generous salary and benefit opportunities. Those that excel in the areas discussed here can be especially well compensated.

“When hiring transformational CIOs, companies typically need to contend with large equity vesting or bonus payouts,” Doyle says. “This can lead to competitive sign-on bonuses or possibly higher than planned compensation which exceeds the anticipated range. It’s a competitive market for CIOs who bring expertise in IT, digital, data, cybersecurity, innovation, and strong team leadership and the compensation needs to align to this.”

To land a top salary, a CIO or candidate needs to focus on their ability to help the organization use technology to realize business goals, drive decisions, and generate revenue.

“The best CIO candidates do a great job being the translator between their background and the job they’re interviewing for,” Hackley explains. “The company is about to go on a journey; that’s why they’re looking for a CIO.

“The best CIOs know how to relate their background and succinctly share where they can add value to this new company, with proven expertise stating where they’ve done it before,” Hackley continues. “Stories and metrics matter. ‘I’ve done this three times’ is a great way to start off, along with pointing out how you may approach things differently here. Interviewers are trying to mitigate risk when they hire. Make their job easy and give them confidence that you’re the person who will guide the way, the right way.”

In addition, most candidates talk only about the end results, Hackley says. “What makes candidates stand out are the roadblocks they faced, and how they overcame them. Think about your biggest wins and what made them difficult to achieve. These are the stories you’ll be remembered by.”

On the flip side, what CIOs should be looking for in their job search are companies with an AI-ready management team or a CEO or board member who understand that the future is different from the past, Doyle says. “Without such alignment at the top, a CIO will be pushing against the norm.”

Next, it’s important to find an organization with a change management capability, Doyle explains.

“Seek out a company with a strong business partner community and a culture that is hungry for innovation and change,” Doyle says. “Ensure that the company has someone dedicated to change management or at least someone who has it in their title. The key to a company’s ability to adopt AI technologies for their own customers and employees will be organization change, and most companies are not very good at that yet.”