The cost of a bad hire isn’t the salary.It’s the six months before you admit it.

A highly specific senior search for a product leader with hands-on AdTech experience, partnering directly with the CPO and CEO. US market exposure was non-negotiable since the client's competitors and customers operated there. Compensation was anchored to a lower-cost market, which meaningfully shrank the senior pool we could reach. The brief asked for leadership and technical depth at the same time: subject-matter fluency in ad operations, software architecture, and performance frameworks.

Targeted sourcing into a niche pool of AdTech operators, not a broad PM funnel. Culture-first screening for value alignment and long-term fit before checking domain depth. Personalised outreach to convert passive senior candidates into engaged conversations. The role was published with a public salary, which pulled the eventual hire in inbound, on top of the active search. Curated shortlist kept tight to protect founder time.

A B2B sales hire for a Managing Director who needed a builder, not a closer. The talent market threw up four real bottlenecks at once: candidates who lacked advanced English for North American buyers, profiles written in native languages that buried qualifications, widespread confusion in some markets where "Account Executive" reads as accounting rather than B2B sales, and generalist commercial backgrounds that the client treated as a red flag. We searched broadly across Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and Latin America to find sales operators with consistent quota-carrying experience.

Intake call to clear hanging points from the brief, then a candidate calibration step where we sent three benchmark profiles to lock in must-haves: quota history, deal cycle type, market experience, selling approach. Deep sourcing on Indeed and LinkedIn Recruiter with strict filters. Heavy curation kept the shortlist to a maximum of three. Pre-screening, expectation setting, and work-test coordination handled inside the search so the MD only saw signal.

A fast-growing 8-figure eCommerce company in the health and wellness space, operating globally with multi-country manufacturing and a direct-to-consumer model. Many of the operational systems still ran through the founders. This was not a maintenance role and not a delegate-and-disappear hire. It was a founder replacement at the operational core of the business: someone who would design, own, and evolve the operational backbone, with the trust to make decisions independently. The hire had to be a value-add to the company from week one, not a learning curve waiting to happen. Trust-heaviness made the search delicate. Get the wrong person in this seat and the founders quietly take the work back.

We searched widely across Eastern Europe, South Africa, LATAM, and onward, mapping markets with strong systems-thinking operational talent at compensation that fit the role. Screening went past the resume and into behaviour: how candidates think in workflows, dependencies, and failure points; how they react when handed ambiguity rather than a checklist; whether they prefer fixing broken systems or talking about them. We pressure-tested their comfort with ownership directly with the founders. The shortlist was deliberately narrow.

An AdTech media company without a recruitment or people framework, hiring across markets and roles with no shared infrastructure. Candidate experience was inconsistent, employer brand was thin, and the hiring team had no way to evaluate volume or signal at scale.

Designed and rolled out the full recruitment and people framework end-to-end. Inclusive, transparent candidate journeys built in collaboration with marketing for an aligned employer brand. Full-cycle hiring across inbound and outbound pipelines. Eleven new HR and recruitment tools introduced across teams, including a candidate-experience-first ATS implementation. Structured check-ins and feedback systems embedded so every interviewed candidate received meaningful feedback.

Engineering hiring with high pass thresholds, including bar-raiser style interview loops, across companies ranging from seed-stage startups to pre-IPO scale-ups. The bar was set by who the client was already hiring from: Bloomberg, Palantir, Amazon, TikTok, and similar.

Sequenced outreach into a curated audience of engineers from top-tier companies. Messaging that treated senior ICs as peers, not as inventory. Tight interview support so every candidate landed in front of the hiring team in the right context.