Insights
Our latest thinking on leadership, search, and the talent landscape.
The first U.S. hire is one of the highest-leverage decisions an international founder will make. Maren Marcelis and Tiffany Sizemore share what the preparation, candidate profile, and onboarding actually look like for companies entering the North American market.
I've spent years placing C-suite leaders into fintech companies across Europe and North America. Here's what I've learned: getting executive hiring right in this sector is not just a people decision - it's a capital markets decision.
Enterprise AI has cleared its experimental phase. In this piece, I use Neptune Software as a lens to examine what the AI transformation wave inside legacy SAP environments means for executive hiring - and the leadership profiles boards and investors are urgently seeking.
There's a tension at the heart of almost every robotics and EV company that reaches Series B: the people who built the technology are engineers, and the people the business now needs are commercially fluent executives. The best companies find leaders who can operate across both.
The datacentre buildout is the largest capital event in computing history. The infrastructure race is underway. The leadership race to support it has barely started.
Here's a story that plays out more often than the industry admits. A PhD student spends years solving a problem the industry hasn't named yet - and builds a real company around it. Then the job changes completely. This is the moment we get called in.
Some observations from conversations with founders and C-suite leaders - and a few questions that keep resurfacing.
For European founders expanding to the US, the biggest challenge isn't product or technology - it's narrative. The US market doesn't buy the here and now. It buys the art of the possible.
Most European founders make critical strategic mistakes before their first US executive search even opens. Here’s what to decide before you post the job.
Most international expansions fail not because of a lack of product-market fit, but because of leadership-market fit. Learn how to find a true Market Founder - not just a regional VP - for your cross-Atlantic expansion.
ClimateTech companies are sitting on some of the most urgent mandates in business history - and many of them are frozen. Not by a lack of ambition, but by the same hiring indecision that has quietly cost more organisations than any hiring mistake ever did. Here is how the best climate-forward leaders are cutting through it.
Few industries have faced the kind of existential turbulence that TravelTech has over the last five years. From pandemic shutdowns to the revenge-travel boom, to AI disruption and sustainability pressure, the ability to anticipate change and pivot has never mattered more for travel and hospitality leaders.
How Groupon partnered with Key Search to secure 10 AI-first, digitally fluent executives in just 8 months - fuelling a bold 10x transformation strategy.
Most leadership failures follow the same pattern: honest feedback stops reaching the top. The research on power, candour, and executive mentoring - and what to do about it.
