For Heads of TA and Talent Directors.
A Director seat opens, and the assumption in the room is automatic: this one goes out to search. Your team already recruits, you already pay for LinkedIn Recruiter, and still the most senior roles leave the building at agency rates. This is about the searches your function could own, and what it takes to own them well.
Your next step
We put your live roles and your team on the table, and map how you land the senior searches you currently hand to agencies, in-house. No pitch. You leave with the plan either way.
Who you would be talking to
Nine years at Sky, on the buy side of hiring — the seat search firms pitch to.
More than 2,000 recruitment and executive search firms coached and worked with since 2010. Including, in all likelihood, the ones your business already uses.
The quiet leak
Most talent leaders carry one unwritten rule: mid and mid-senior roles are ours, and the genuinely senior ones go out to search. It rarely gets examined, because everyone is busy and the agencies deliver.
Then you look at the last twelve months. A quarter to a third of the Director, Head of, and some VP hires your team could have run were still briefed out, at 25 to 33 percent of salary each time.
It is not that your recruiters are weak. They fill mid-senior roles well. The gap is narrow and specific: running a real brief with a hiring manager, mapping a market properly, and approaching senior people quietly, with no job ad and no noise. That is a different craft, and nobody ever built it into the function.
Why it is hard to fix from where you sit
Cost. You are asked to bring search spend down, while the roles carrying the largest fees are exactly the ones being sent out.
Quality. The tools handed to you for senior roles are job boards and InMails, pitched at the wrong altitude for someone who will run a division.
Politics. A department head who wants certainty goes around TA and straight to an agency they already know, and you find out after the brief has gone.
Status. All of it quietly reinforces the idea that talent acquisition is an administrative function, not a commercial one.
Career risk. One senior internal search that visibly fails is more dangerous to you than ten agency hires nobody remembers. So the safe choice, every time, is to hand it over.
You are being asked to cut search fees and to not embarrass the hiring manager. Job boards cannot do both. A real brief, a map, and a discreet approach can.
What already got tried
When senior hiring feels hard, the usual answers are simply more of what already exists.
More hands on the same mid-market roles.
More reach, same InMail pitched at the wrong level.
Faster at finding people, not at running a search.
Cleaner process around the same kind of hire.
Every one of these fixes volume. None of them fixes the moment a hiring manager looks at a mid-level slate for a Director seat and quietly picks up the phone to a search firm instead.
The work
This is not a sourcing course. Sourcing trainers, the Grassroots, Queri and REC style programmes, teach recruiters to find more people faster, and they do it well. That is a volume skill, and L&D usually buys it.
This is a different purchase, and the buyer is the Head of TA. The aim is to build an in-house executive search function that keeps the senior work in-house and runs it to the standard a good search firm would.
Which Director, Head of and VP searches the company should own, and which genuinely belong with an agency. One clear line, agreed with you.
How a senior search is actually run: the brief, the market map, the discreet approach, the assessment, and the close.
The method becomes a standard your recruiters and hiring managers can hold to, so it does not walk out of the door when one person does.
It runs on a real, current Director, Head of or VP search, coached end to end, so the function is proven on a live seat, not a slide.
It starts with a short diagnostic of how senior hiring runs today and where the leak is. From there it becomes a hands-on programme built around one real, live senior search, coached the whole way through.
In-house executive search
From the hiring manager intake to the signed offer: the market mapped, the approach, the assessment and the close, all of it taught to your team, so you stop paying a third of salary to an agency.
A private advisory relationship for the Head of TA who owns executive hiring.
An in-person programme at your offices that gives your team the search craft the search firms charge a third of salary for.
The complete in-house executive search method, from intake to offer, in a gated online programme your team uses on demand.
A leadership EVP and employer brand aimed at the senior people you most want, so they already know why they'd join you.
A tailored advisory and capability programme for organisations hiring senior leaders across several functions, regions or business units.
Why me
I have worked on the hiring side at BSkyB, the seat that search firms pitch to, and since then inside corporates including Experian. I read the search pitch from the buyer's chair, which is the chair you sit in.
Since 2010 I have coached and worked with more than 2,000 recruitment and executive search firms. That is the other side of the same table: the firms your team briefs its Director and VP roles out to, and the method they use when they run those searches properly. I know how those searches are really run, and there is no reason your team cannot run them too.
Why this method carries weight
These are not clients of your talent function. They are senior figures from the executive search industry — the side of the table your Director roles get briefed out to. It is their craft that gets built into your team.
“The ‘Built to Sell’ for the search industry.”
Two ways to take it further
If senior hiring leaving the building is a live problem in your organisation, the fastest route is a direct conversation about which searches you should be keeping and how to run them.
No pitch deck. A straight look at how senior hiring runs in your function today.
Not ready to book?
If it is a fit I will reply with times.