The best senior hire is rarely the one who’s looking
The candidates who apply are self-selecting for availability, not calibre. Sachith Rai on why the market’s obsession with the active funnel quietly costs you the best seats.
4 min readRead
GCC executive search
Executive search for a GCC is a different brief from a domestic leadership hire: the mandate sits inside another company’s reporting lines, and the best candidate is rarely the one who’s looking. We write on how senior GCC searches actually close — the mandate test, the assessment, the offer. Read the analysis below, or follow the market in The Mandate Desk.
9 articles
All insightsThe consultancies are selling you a benchmark. You need a decision.
A published band tells you where the market was six months ago. Sachith Rai on why the big firms stop exactly where the useful part begins.
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‘Culture fit’ is how good centres talk themselves out of great leaders
The most cited reason a senior candidate gets passed over is the one nobody can define. A contrarian read on the orthodoxy most GCC panels never question.
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What we hear in the last conversation before a leader says yes
It’s almost never the money. From hundreds of senior closes, the one thing the winning offer got right that the runner-up didn’t.
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Some seats should never see a recruiter, including ours
Against our own commercial interest: the executive seats a company should never outsource to any search firm.
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The mandate test: five questions that reveal whether a GCC head owns hiring
Before you accept or scope the role, five questions expose whether a GCC head’s hiring authority is real or nominal.
9 min readRead
Counter-offers work because your process gave the leader time to have doubts
The market blames the counter-offer. We think that’s the wrong culprit. A contrarian view on where senior mandates really lose the candidate.
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The three things every GCC gets wrong about senior hiring
Three inherited HQ assumptions that fail in-market, and why cloning the parent company’s playbook is the fatal one.
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The leadership assessment we run before a GCC head hire closes
The four dimensions that predict whether a leader will grow with the centre or plateau with it, drawn from two decades of placements.
11 min readRead