Executive search · India

A senior search is decided before anyone is approached.

Not at the shortlist, and not in the final interview. It is decided in the week when someone writes down what good looks like, and that is the one week almost nobody protects.

If your search has not started, that is the work worth protecting. If it has been open ninety days, it is probably the work that was not.

Thirty minutes. If we are not the right firm for the role, we will say so on the call.

Every search we run is judged on two questions.

Did we agree what good looks like before we started?

Can we show you why each person we sent meets it?

The first is clarity. The second is judgment. Almost every failed senior search fails one of these, and the failure shows up months later as a role that stays open, a shortlist nobody is excited by, or a hire that does not work out.

One search where that was the whole problem.

A VP Sales role at an agritech business moving fresh produce, Series A, shortly after a raise. The role needed B2B sales leadership and fresh produce logistics in the same person, and searching by job title returns neither.

We stopped searching for the title and mapped companies instead. No job boards, no referrals. Sixteen people came out of that map, nine were interviewed, one joined and is still there.

The bottleneck was never sourcing. It was targeting.

Clarity means we agree what good looks like, in writing, before anyone is approached.

Most clients come to us with the role defined in part. That is normal. A job description written by a busy leader captures what they already know. The job of calibration is to take it to the depth a senior hire actually needs.

1. Search Alignment Questionnaire. What has to be true in twelve months. What this person owns and what they do not.
2. Search Calibration Document. Mission, first-year outcomes, ownership boundaries, and the two or three things we will not compromise on.
3. Role Clarity and Success Framework. What this person must have done before, and what they must achieve once they are in.
4. Reference Profile Alignment. Before we approach a single person, we find real profiles that match the calibration and send them to you.

That fourth step is the one almost every search skips. Discovering a misalignment on a reference profile costs a day. Discovering it on your fourth interview costs six weeks.

Judgment is deciding who actually meets it, and showing you why.

You will see a small number of people. That small number is drawn from something much larger. Here is one search, a VP Engineering role we ran under confidentiality.

192: Companies mapped
365: People researched and worked through
28: Shown to the client

The 337 people who did not reach the client were not rejected casually. Each one was a decision. This is the test. The question worth asking any search firm is whether they can explain, for each person, the specific reason this candidate and not the other three hundred.

Five things we put in writing at the start of every search.

1
We will not approach anyone until you have confirmed the Search Calibration Document.
2
Before we go to market, you will see real reference profiles and confirm that this is the shape of person you mean.
3
Every person we submit arrives with a written assessment against the parameters we agreed, including what we are still unsure about.
4
If fewer than four in five of the people we submit clear to interview, we stop. We do not send you another profile until the calibration has been rewritten and you have signed it off.
5
If we come to believe the role is the problem rather than the market, we will say so. That conversation is uncomfortable and we have it anyway.

Three searches with three different starting points.

Search one · A role run from the start

Chief Business Officer at a semiconductor training business.

Nothing had gone wrong here. The role was new and the client’s own talent team was already looking. We ran it as one search unit rather than two, working from a single map with a daily sync. Nine people were submitted. All nine went to shortlist. Forty days from brief to joining.

One team, one timeline, one outcome.

Search two · The screen was wrong, not the market

Open six months as VP Engineering. Filled by someone who had never held the title.

A sitting VP was among the rejections, which means the load written in the brief was never the problem. The search was screening on current title as a proxy for readiness, and at Series A that proxy breaks. 116 people mapped · 16 cleared the screen · 6 interviewed · 1 joined. Nineteen months on, that person is a Senior Vice President.

Hire the load, not the label.

Search three · Some searches cannot be posted at all

A VP Operations role that could not be advertised, named, or referred.

Naming it would have signalled restructuring to competitors and to the team already in place. No job advertisement, no LinkedIn post, no referrals. Candidates confirmed their interest and signed an NDA before they were told which company it was. One offer went out, and it was the first choice.

For a whole category of senior role, every channel a job board depends on is closed before the search begins.

A search is not finished when someone signs. It is finished when that person is still in the role a year later, doing the thing they were hired for.

All three are still in their seats. The earliest of them is nineteen months in and has been promoted since.

Two of the clients on this page have run more than ten further searches with us since the one described here. Repeat work is the only reference a search firm cannot write for itself.

Thirty minutes, whether the search has started or not.