I embed. Then I go and find them.
Not a transactional recruiter. Every engagement starts with understanding the business, and the work only gets more specific from there.
John Hillard
Every call, every brief, personallyNot a transactional recruiter. Every engagement starts with understanding the business, and the work only gets more specific from there.
Before a role is written, I study the company: what it does, how it operates, where it sits in its market, what it needs to achieve and what kind of people will get it there. From that I construct a market message that's honest and compelling, one that attracts the candidates who would have dismissed the business on a job description alone. Then I activate the network against it.
The relationship deepens over time. I learn the culture, the leadership, the hiring mistakes the company has already made, and what it actually takes to hire well into it. That's why my longest engagements run for a decade and seventy placements, not a single search.
Sourcing, network activation, screening, briefing, managing and closing. Every part of every engagement is handled by me. No juniors, no handoffs.
Remuneration benchmarking, talent landscape analysis, competitive market context and interview process consultancy are built into the engagement, not sold as extras.
Recruitment is the shop window. Every candidate who goes through a process I run, placed or not, leaves with a positive impression of the client. There are no more intimate prospective buyers than people deciding whether to work for you.
Specialist individual contributors through to Senior Managers, Directors, Partners and the C-suite. Permanent placement and contract or interim resourcing, whatever the function and whatever the complexity of the brief.
Where an internal talent function exists, I augment it with specialist external reach. A strong in-house function plus my network is a genuine competitive advantage, and I treat it that way.
Technology and services companies at an inflection point: a major contract won, a new market entered, an acquisition made, a product ready to scale. Enterprise software, SaaS, engineering services, and defence and government-aligned technology organisations. Companies with a real story, a genuine differentiator and the ambition to grow, led by someone with a track record and a compelling view of where they're going.
I work with a small number of clients at any time, chosen carefully, and I'm most useful where a generalist recruiter will fail: rare capability, high-stakes executive hires, security-cleared professionals, and specialist combinations that don't exist in volume. If you value quality of hire over the speed of a CV pile, and you know the cost of getting it wrong, you're who this is for.
What you're paying for is the quality of judgment applied to your brief and the depth of the network activated against it. Both belong to one person. The person who takes your call is the person who does the work. The person presenting your shortlist is the person who spoke with fifty others to select them. That isn't a limitation I've learned to live with. It's the design.
If you have a hire a generalist will fail to solve, I'd rather talk it through than read a submission. Email first and I'll call you back the same day I can.