Practice
What we take on, and how it runs.
Retained search, a small number at a time, run personally from brief to the first hundred days.
The work
Board & independent directors
- Composition work as much as search. What is the table missing — a sector view, a functional gap, a dissenting temperament — before the question of who fills the seat.
C-suite & executive committee
- Chief executives and their direct reports. Where the hire has to work alongside an incumbent team that did not choose them.
Founding & early leadership
- The first commercial, people or operating leader a founder hires. Small in title, disproportionate in consequence.
Succession & transition
- Mapping internal successors honestly against the outside market, well before a seat opens, so the answer is not decided by whoever is available in a hurry.
How a search runs
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Week 0
The brief
Time with whoever the hire reports to, and with the people they’ll have to win over. What comes out is a written brief describing what the role has to fix. If it contradicts the job description you started with, good. That’s usually the useful part.
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Weeks 1–3
The map
The market as it actually is. Who holds this job today, where, and which of them you could realistically get. You see all of it, including the people we judge to be out of reach, and why.
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Weeks 3–6
Approach
The approaches are made by whoever will be sitting across from you, not passed to a researcher. These people aren’t looking, so the first conversation is about them rather than about your role. Most say no. A few say no now and yes in two years, and those are worth just as much.
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Weeks 6–8
The shortlist
Three or four people, each with a written assessment that includes the case against them. If we can’t build a shortlist we actually believe in, you’ll be told that rather than handed a padded one.
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Weeks 8–12
Decision & close
Interview design, reference calls that go beyond the names they hand you, and the offer conversation. Closing a senior candidate is a different skill from finding one. It’s also where most searches fall over.
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After
The first hundred days
A hire isn’t a placement until it works. We stay in touch with both sides through onboarding, because the things that end senior tenures show up early and quietly.
Twelve weeks is the shape of a typical search, not a promise. A hard-to-reach market takes longer, and we would rather say so at the start.
The part that catches people out
Almost everyone arriving from abroad is told that India runs on ninety days’ notice, usually in the tone reserved for tax law. It is not law. Private employment here is governed by the contract rather than by automatic statutory protection, with notice running anywhere from 15 to 90 days depending on seniority, the type of employment and the state.
Ninety days is a convention in technology and financial services. It is a term somebody negotiated, which means it can be negotiated again. Buyouts are ordinary, partial waivers are ordinary, and whether you get one depends almost entirely on whether anybody raised it in the first conversation rather than at offer stage.
The real cost is not the ninety days. It is treating that window as dead time, with a candidate sitting inside their old employer being talked out of leaving while the new one goes quiet because the paperwork is signed. We plan that window as part of the search, which is the difference between a third of offers failing and most of them holding.
What you actually receive
A written brief
- Before any names. It says what the role has to fix rather than what it is called, and it is the document the rest of the search is measured against.
A market map
- Who holds this job in India today, which of them are realistically reachable, and which are not and why. You see the people we cannot get as well as the ones we can.
Written assessments
- Three or four people, each with the case against them set out alongside the case for. A shortlist with no dissent in it has usually not been thought about hard enough.
Reference calls beyond the list
- The names a candidate offers are the easy ones. What matters is whether the last team they built is still standing and whether the people they hired would work for them again.