What is executive search?
Executive search is recruitment turned proactive: instead of advertising a role and filtering applications, a specialised consultancy maps the relevant market, identifies the people already doing the job well — almost all of them not looking — and approaches them directly and confidentially. The method exists for roles where the best candidates never apply: managing directors, country managers, heads of sales, and scarce technical specialists.
The defining commercial feature is the retainer. The client engages one firm exclusively and pays in stages, and in return the firm commits its full effort to a systematic search of the whole market — not just its existing database. That exclusivity is what makes confidential mandates, such as replacing an incumbent, possible at all.
How a search mandate runs
A professional search follows a repeatable structure. From briefing to signed contract, a typical mandate in our practice takes six to twelve weeks and moves through five stages:
- Briefing and market mapping: the role profile is sharpened, then the target market — competitors, adjacent industries, relevant functions — is mapped into a long list of named individuals.
- Direct approach: candidates are contacted personally and discreetly; the first conversations are about their situation, not a job advert.
- Structured assessment: interested candidates go through competency-based interviews, track-record verification and, where useful, assessment tools.
- Shortlist: the client sees a small, fully documented set of qualified, motivated candidates — typically three to five — with comparable profiles.
- Offer and closing: the consultant moderates references, negotiation and resignation — the phase where searches are most often lost without guidance.
Retained search vs. contingency recruitment
Contingency recruiters work for free until placement, usually alongside competitors, and are therefore economically pushed toward speed: sending available candidates from the database quickly, to several clients if need be. Retained search inverts the incentive — paid in stages, exclusive, and accountable for covering the entire market, including the passive majority a database never shows. Neither model is inherently better; they price different problems.
The practical boundary: contingency works where qualified candidates are plentiful and applying. The moment a profile is scarce, senior or confidential, retained search wins — which is why the term is often used interchangeably with headhunting, though executive search names the systematic, retained end of that spectrum.
Why executive search dominates European market entry
The first hire in a new country — country manager, head of sales — is the highest-leverage decision of the whole expansion, and the pool of people who combine industry knowledge, local networks and the appetite to build from zero is tiny in any market. In Germany or France, the strongest technical sales leaders are employed, courted and invisible to job ads; only direct approach reaches them.
This is our home turf as a boutique: leadership and technical sales searches in machinery, industrial technology and recycling. A recent example is a Sales Engineer search in the DACH region for a Swedish air-treatment specialist — 992 profiles mapped, twelve candidates presented, every one of them passive. A mandate that could only be filled through systematic direct search, because the right profiles never apply to job ads.
