Retained Search & Talent Partnership
Boards set direction. Operating leadership delivers it — and that tier is where most hiring processes get least rigorous. We run retained search for those seats, with the calibration depth normally reserved for the C-suite.
A short slate you can actually decide from, built by narrowing before the search rather than filtering after it.
Every shortlisted candidate is back-channelled through colleagues we find ourselves, not only the referees they nominate.
We stay engaged through onboarding and the first two quarters, where most senior hires actually succeed or fail.
Why This Layer
Board and C-suite appointments get months of attention. Operating leadership — the business heads and functional leaders who actually carry the plan — is routinely hired in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the rigour.
The research is blunt about the outcome: across studies, roughly a third to half of senior hires underperform or leave within eighteen months, and the overwhelming majority fail for cultural and relational reasons no CV could reveal.
We call it operating leadership. It is where the plan either lands or quietly doesn't, and our practice exists to give it boardroom-grade search discipline.
How We're Different
Volume shifts the filtering burden back onto you and calls it choice. We calibrate hard enough before the search that roughly one in three candidates we present becomes the hire. Fewer conversations, each one worth having.
We decompose a mandate into the capabilities, scale context and situational archetype the seat actually demands, then search against those. It surfaces strong candidates whose titles would never have matched — and screens out those whose titles matched but whose context does not.
Nominated referees confirm a story the candidate chose to tell. We find people who worked alongside them and ask what they would say if they were not being watched. It is slower, and it is where the real signal lives.
We assess for who a person could become in five years and who they would develop beneath them, not only whether they can do the job on Monday. The marginal cost of asking is nil; the cost of never having asked is measured in years.
The Engagement
A search is a series of deliverables, not a black box that produces CVs. This is the shape of every mandate we run.
Week 1
We interrogate the role before we search it. What does success look like in eighteen months, which relationships make or break the seat, what has failed here before, and is this genuinely one job or two.
Weeks 2–4
We map the market organisation by organisation rather than working a visible shortlist, then approach privately. Most of the people who matter at this level are not looking, and will not respond to a posting.
Weeks 3–7
Structured interviews against the agreed framework, probing behaviour under ambiguity, ownership and how someone reads a room they have never sat in. Back-channel referencing runs in parallel, not as a final formality.
On selection
We manage the negotiation candidly on both sides, including the conversations about counter-offers and internal equity that tend to derail closes late.
First two quarters
Most senior hires that fail do so for cultural and relational reasons within the first year. We stay in contact with both sides through that window, surfacing misalignment while it is still fixable.
Where We Operate
Our founders have operated inside these industries, not just recruited for them.
Insights
Gartner expects one in four candidate profiles worldwide to be fake by 2028. The defence isn't better software — it's verification that doesn't run through the candidate.
12 August 2026
Employers expect 39% of core skills to change by 2030. A title tells you where someone sat; it does not tell you what they can do next — and that gap is now the search problem.
24 July 2026
Around half of senior hires fail within eighteen months — and almost none of them fail because they couldn't do the technical work. What predicts success is a different list entirely.
8 July 2026
Tell us what the role has to deliver in eighteen months. We'll come back with a candid read on the market, the compensation reality, and how we'd run it.
