The GM two agencies couldn't find.
Two agencies had run the same GM search and come up empty. The problem wasn't the market. It was the brief.
The challenge
A multinational cybersecurity provider had run the same GM search twice, with two different agencies, and come up empty both times. Months had passed with nothing to show for them. The easy conclusion was that the market did not hold the person.
What we found
It was not the market. It was the brief.
The profile had been written from the title down: years of experience, industry background, reporting lines. What it never named was what this particular GM had to own in this particular business. Two searches had been run faithfully against that document, and a brief that has never been defined against the business need can only be filled by accident.
What we did
We started over at the source, with a discovery process with the leadership team built around one question: what does this person have to deliver in the first year, and what has to be true about their background for that to be possible?
The answers rebuilt the profile. From there the search was narrow on purpose. Fewer names, each one deliberate, each one measured against the real mandate rather than a generic title, and each one arriving with a written case for why they fit it, so the client was deciding against the same standard we were.
The result
A shortlist in the client's hands within 15 days, and a GM hired within eight weeks, after two agencies and months of searching had produced neither.