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My Approach

Most searches I take on start the same way: the role has already been to market. Sometimes with another firm, sometimes advertised directly, sometimes both. By the time we talk, the easy answers have been tried.

So the first thing I do isn't search. It's understand why the role hasn't filled. Sometimes the brief is describing a person who doesn't exist. Sometimes the right people have already been approached, badly. Sometimes the role itself needs reshaping before anyone worth having will take it. I'll tell you which one it is, even if it's not what you were hoping to hear.

The brief comes first

I don't start with job descriptions. I start by understanding what you're actually trying to achieve, what the board or the business is asking of you, where the gaps are in the team you've got, and what the person who solves this actually looks like in your environment. Not just the title, the specific experience, leadership style, and execution capability that will work in your world.

This is where my background earns its keep. I spent ten years working in enterprise IT, in the rooms where CIOs and their leadership teams made complex delivery decisions. I don't need the role explained to me twice, and when a candidate describes their work, I can tell whether they led it or were near it.

Then I go find the person

Not the ones actively searching. The ones already delivering somewhere else, the leaders who get multiple offers when they do move. They don't respond to job ads, and they don't respond to a bad approach. They respond to someone who understands their work and can describe a role worth leaving for.

One search at a time, exclusively

I work on a small number of assignments, each with clear air. No parallel advertising, no competing agencies. Partly because that's what the best candidates deserve, and partly because it's the only way the search actually works. It also means I only take work I believe I can deliver.

Sometimes one role becomes a team

One CIO at a $12 billion ASX organisation brought me a single role that had already been out to market. Eighteen months later I'd placed nine senior leaders for him, a CISO, GM Strategy & Architecture, GM Digital & Enterprise Applications, and six others across AI, governance, platforms, and engagement. A connected team, built in the right order, because getting the first hires right makes every one after easier.

That's how the work tends to go. It starts with the hard role. What happens next is up to the results.