The Situation

A multi-billion-dollar global conglomerate headquartered in Korea was making a calculated entry into the U.S. life sciences market through a venture-backed startup built for innovation and growth. The strategy was clear. The leadership infrastructure to execute it was not.

To move forward, the organization needed to establish its first U.S. executive team across Human Resources, Legal, and Finance, simultaneously, and without the benefit of established processes, market familiarity, or a fully formed organizational blueprint. What began as three executive searches became a more foundational challenge: building leadership infrastructure in an unfamiliar market, inside an organization still defining itself.

The Challenge

The searches themselves were not the hard part.

The harder problem was that the organization had not yet defined what success looked like in any of the three functions. Reporting structures were unsettled. Leadership profiles were still forming. And internal stakeholders, operating from business cultures with fundamentally different assumptions about how executive hiring works in the United States, held divergent expectations about what the process should produce and how long it should take.

The obstacles were real and layered:

• No established framework for U.S. executive compensation or hiring norms

• Significant communication challenges between the international leadership team and the U.S. talent market

• Ambiguity around organizational design, role scope, and operating model

• The need for executives capable of building infrastructure from scratch within the constraints of a globally matrixed parent organization

Launching searches into that environment without first creating alignment would have produced the wrong candidates, or no viable candidates at all.

The Approach

Before any external outreach began, the work started internally.

I spent significant time with senior leadership working through the questions that needed answers before a search could be positioned effectively in the market. What does each function need to accomplish in the first twelve months? How does this U.S. platform relate to the parent organization's structure and decision-making pace? What kind of leader succeeds in an entrepreneurial environment while operating within a global enterprise?

That work produced clarity across leadership competency definition, organizational design and reporting structure, and executive compensation benchmarking. Equally important, it drew a sharp distinction between executives with impressive credentials and those who could actually build within ambiguity, a distinction that is easy to overlook and costly to get wrong.

This was not advisory work for its own sake. It was the prerequisite to running searches that would produce the right outcomes.

Navigating the Cultural Dimension

The cultural complexity of this engagement was not background context. It was active, ongoing work that shaped every phase of the process.

Communication styles, decision-making cadence, and expectations around the executive hiring experience differed materially between the international leadership team and U.S. market norms. Moving too quickly risked misalignment. Moving without deliberate interpretation risked losing credibility with both sides.

Beyond translation, I advised on the mechanics of U.S. executive hiring the organization had no prior exposure to: offer construction, negotiation cadence, the weight of candidate experience, and how to balance legal protection with making a compelling case to a senior leader evaluating an unfamiliar organization in a new market. For executives at this level, how the process feels is inseparable from whether they say yes.

The Search

With alignment established, I conducted targeted market mapping across relevant industries and growth-stage organizations, with a deliberate focus not on the most credentialed executives available, but on the right ones.

The candidate profile demanded something specific: leaders who could build infrastructure while simultaneously supporting growth, operate with confidence inside ambiguity, navigate cross-cultural environments without friction, and thrive within an organization that was simultaneously entrepreneurial and globally matrixed. That combination is uncommon. Identifying it required a search methodology that looked beyond conventional markers of executive success.

The Outcome

The engagement produced the successful placement of executive leadership across Human Resources, Legal, and Finance, providing the operational foundation the organization needed to pursue its U.S. growth strategy with confidence.

Beyond the placements, the process left the organization meaningfully better equipped for what comes next. Internal stakeholders developed a working fluency in U.S. executive hiring, the norms, the expectations, the judgment calls, that they did not have at the outset. That institutional knowledge has lasting value.

Sometimes the mechanics of a search matter less than what happens before it starts. Getting alignment on what success looks like, what the market will bear, and what kind of leader actually thrives in the environment you are building, that work is not preliminary. It is the work. Everything else follows from it.

The Situation

This search came to me the way the best ones often do. A client I'd worked with for years, across more than one search, called to introduce me to a peer at a complex manufacturing company. They needed help, and they needed it handled quietly. That introduction mattered. It meant I walked in already carrying someone else's trust, which is the only reason a conversation this sensitive could start as openly as it did.

What the company needed was a new VP of Accounting, and the search was confidential. The reason was a delicate one. The person in the seat was not working out. But they were still in the role, still showing up every day, and had no idea a search was underway.

That changed how everything had to be handled. The engagement was covered by an NDA from the outset. We could not post the role. We could not be open about why it existed or who it was meant to replace. Every conversation, inside the company and out in the market, had to be managed with care, because a single careless word could reach the wrong person and turn a quiet transition into a mess.

The requirement itself was specific. This was a manufacturing business with real operational complexity, and they ran a particular accounting and ERP system that very few people outside a narrow slice of the industry had ever touched. They needed a VP of Accounting who already knew that system cold. They did not have the runway to let someone learn it on the job.

The Real Challenge

On paper, the candidates didn't exist. In reality, they were everywhere. The problem was that no one could see them.

The previous effort to fill the role had been run the obvious way: search for the title, search for the name of the system, and see who comes back. But almost nobody puts the name of a niche internal accounting system on their LinkedIn profile. People list their title and their employer. They don't list the obscure close software they used every month for five years. So a search built around that system name came back nearly empty, and the few profiles that did mention it were mostly people who had brushed up against it once and moved on.

The talent was out there. It just wasn't labeled the way everyone was looking for it.

There was a second issue, and it belonged to the client. They had locked onto the system as the one thing that mattered, and in doing so they'd lost sight of the bigger question. The system can be learned by the right person in a matter of weeks. What can't be taught quickly is the judgment to run accounting inside a manufacturing business, the experience closing complex books, managing cost accounting, and standing on your own in front of a CFO and a private equity board. I wanted us hiring for that, with the system as something we'd find along the way, not the wall we kept running into.

The Approach

Before I went anywhere near the market, I sat down with the client and worked through what this role actually had to do. Which requirements truly couldn't bend, and which were just things we'd written down because they felt safe? That conversation shifted the target. Instead of hunting for the handful of people who happened to name the system, we started looking for people who had almost certainly used it, whether they'd ever written it down or not.

The way you find those people is by working backward. You don't look for the system on profiles. You figure out which companies actually run it, and then you go find the accountants who worked at those companies.

Years ago, I'd have done this entirely by hand, and on an earlier search I did exactly that. A role had sat open for months because no one could find candidates with a specific piece of software experience. So I went and found the software company's page, looked at the hundreds of companies that followed and engaged with it, pulled that list of companies, and fed them into LinkedIn Recruiter. Suddenly I had dozens of candidates who'd clearly used the software at those companies, even though not one of them had it written on their profile. The role got filled.

This search had the same bones, so I used the same instinct, just with far better tools. AI let me do at scale what I used to do one company at a time. I used it to pull the real skills out of the job description and search on those instead of titles. I used it to build and rework search strings faster than I ever could by hand. I used it to figure out which companies and supplier networks in the manufacturing world actually ran this system, and to surface accountants in similar environments whose experience would carry over even if their background didn't match on the surface.

What the AI did was widen the field. It put dozens of qualified people in front of me who would never have shown up in an ordinary search. What it could not do was choose. That part was still mine. Out of that larger group, I had to sort out who had genuinely led versus who had simply been in the room, who could handle the pace and the personalities of a PE-backed manufacturer, and who I could approach discreetly without the conversation getting back to the wrong people.

The Outcome

The VP of Accounting we placed never came up in a single keyword search and never would have. He came out of a comparable manufacturing business that happened to run the same system, had spent years closing complex books and partnering with finance leadership, and knew the system as well as anyone we could have hoped to find. He just hadn't bothered to advertise it.

The transition was handled cleanly and quietly, which in a confidential search matters as much as the placement itself. The incumbent's exit was managed with discretion. The new VP stepped in and was running the close within his first cycle. The role that had sat stuck for months closed once we stopped searching for the words on the page and started searching for the person behind them.

Creative sourcing isn't a trick you pull out once. It's a way of thinking — a habit of asking where this person would actually be, rather than who happened to write the right words on a profile. The tools have changed a lot. A decade ago that meant pulling a list of companies off a Facebook page by hand. Today it means AI that can map an entire market in an afternoon.

The market is rarely missing the right person. It's usually just describing them differently than you are. AI keeps getting better at showing you everyone. Knowing who's right has always been the job, and it still is.

The Situation

A venture-backed mobility and technology startup was scaling aggressively and needed a Chief Human Resources Officer who could keep pace. The leadership team had strong conviction about the profile: someone forged in a hyper-growth environment, ideally from Airbnb, Uber, or a comparable high-scale technology platform. The reference points were clear. The belief was that person was findable, and findable within a compensation range that did not reflect what that profile actually costs in the market.

That combination, a precisely defined pedigree requirement and a below-market compensation assumption, is one of the most common places executive searches stall. It reduces the viable candidate pool before the search begins, and it tends to produce a long, frustrating process that eventually forces a reckoning. The question is whether that reckoning happens early, with data, or late, after months of misaligned outreach.

The Challenge

The challenge was not finding CHRO talent. The challenge was helping a fast-moving leadership team see the market as it actually was, not as they had assumed it to be, without losing the alignment and momentum the search depended on.

Layered on top of the market dynamics was an internal one: multiple senior stakeholders held strong and not fully aligned views on what the right hire looked like. A search launched into that environment either produces a candidate who satisfies no one, or a process that stalls in evaluation because the criteria themselves are in conflict.

The incoming CHRO would also need to relocate to Los Angeles. At the senior executive level, how a company handles that conversation is part of how it presents itself as an employer. It shapes whether a high-quality candidate takes the opportunity seriously.

The Approach

Before any external outreach began, I invested significant time in the alignment work the search required. That meant multiple working sessions with the leadership team, conducted both virtually and on-site. I visited personally to meet the team, understand the culture, and build the kind of trust that makes honest market feedback land rather than generate resistance.

Those sessions were not intake calls. They were working sessions focused on the questions that needed answers: What does this function actually need to accomplish in year one? Which requirements are load-bearing and which are preferences? Where does the compensation assumption hold, and where does the market data say otherwise? The FAANG-pedigree-at-below-market expectation was addressed directly and early, with data. Narrowing the search to only those candidates produced a pool too small to run a credible search against. Expanding the criteria to include executives who had done equivalent work in comparable environments, without requiring a specific employer on the resume, changed the quality and size of the pool materially.

With that recalibration in place, I mapped the market across the West Coast, targeting HR executives who had built and scaled people functions inside high-growth technology businesses and were open to a Los Angeles relocation. I presented multiple candidate slates, facilitated ongoing stakeholder calibration sessions, and maintained full integration with the client's internal talent acquisition workflow, including direct access to their ATS, Workday, operating as a true extension of the team throughout the process.

When a finalist emerged, she flew to Los Angeles for in-person interviews with the leadership team. That step mattered. At the CHRO level, the in-person dynamic is not a formality. It is where real alignment gets tested.

The Outcome

The placed CHRO brought exactly what the role required: experience scaling a people function inside a fast-moving, high-growth technology environment, the executive presence to partner credibly at the C-suite level, and the cultural instincts to lead in an organization that moves at speed.

She did not walk into unanimous enthusiasm. There was skepticism among some stakeholders, as there often is when a search has required recalibration from the original profile. She earned the room. By the end of the process, she had the full support of the leadership team, not because the criteria were lowered, but because she demonstrated precisely the capability the role demanded.

She relocated to Los Angeles and stepped into the role.

The strength of the engagement led to a retained search: standing up the HR leadership for the company's EMEA operation. That search required navigating time zone complexity, language and cultural considerations across markets, and identifying a leader capable of building an HR function in a region where the company had not previously had infrastructure. I led that search personally from start to finish, and we placed a leader who could do exactly that.

A client who hands you their domestic CHRO search and then asks you to lead their international expansion search is telling you something about the nature of the relationship.

Hyper-growth startups move fast and hold strong convictions. That combination is a strength in the market and a real challenge in a search. The advisor's job is to tell a fast-moving client what they need to hear before the market does it for them, and to have built enough trust that the conversation feels like clarity rather than friction. When that works, the right hire earns the room on their own terms.

The Situation

A fast-growing, private equity-backed entertainment and media company came to me through a referral — the kind that comes from reputation rather than a pitch. They needed a Head of Human Resources. The organization had built something genuinely exciting, a brand with real cultural cachet, and was at the inflection point where instinct and momentum alone could no longer carry the people function. They needed someone to build it properly.

The founder-led culture was part of what made the company special. It was also what made this search hard.

The Real Challenge

The President came in with a clear picture of who he wanted. The candidate needed to have built and streamlined HR inside a fast-paced, PE-backed startup. They needed to come from the industry, to already know the brand, to have operated at pace in an environment like this one. But the compensation was set below where the market actually clears for that profile.

Individually, none of those requirements was unreasonable. Together, they reduced the viable candidate pool to fewer than a dozen people in the market, only some of whom were open to a move at all.

The challenge wasn't finding the talent. It was helping a founder see the market as it was, not as he had imagined it, without losing the alignment that makes a search work.

The Approach

Before launching any outreach, I sat down with the President to do the harder work first. What did he actually need this person to accomplish in the first year? Which of his requirements were load-bearing and which were preferences that felt essential but weren't? How far could we stretch into adjacent industries without sacrificing the things that genuinely mattered? Where was there room to flex?

Once we had that clarity, I mapped the market against the full set of parameters and brought back what I found. Here is what exists. Here is what is realistically available. Here are the tradeoffs attached to each constraint. Fewer than a dozen people met every original requirement, and the compensation expectations of those who did sat above the approved range. Expanding even one or two parameters materially changed the quality and size of the pool.

I don't think of this as pushing back. It's market intelligence presented honestly. The data makes the case so I don't have to.

The Outcome

Candidate feedback, real-time market intelligence, and ongoing conversation with the President shaped how we refined the criteria over time. The hire who ultimately emerged was someone the original search criteria would have screened out. She brought the growth-stage instincts, leadership capability, and cultural fluency the role actually required.

She is still there today.

The placement led directly to a second engagement: an international search for an EVP of Sales based in Singapore. One search, conducted well, became a sustained talent partnership.

Sometimes the best search partnership isn't about finding candidates. It's about showing a client what the market actually contains and having the credibility to make that uncomfortable when it needs to be.

The Situation

A large mission-driven healthcare services organization, more than 5,000 employees operating across dozens of sites throughout Southern California, had a broken HR function and a mandate to fix it.

They retained me to find a Chief Human Resources Officer. But the brief, as written, understated what the organization actually needed. The incoming leader would have to walk into a politically complex executive environment, rebuild trust with senior leadership, modernize operations that had struggled for years, and do all of it while managing a large, geographically dispersed team without the benefit of established systems or strong organizational momentum.

On paper, it was a CHRO search. In practice, it was something harder.

The Real Challenge

Intake conversations with executive stakeholders did what good intake conversations are supposed to do: they surfaced what the job description couldn't capture.

The organization wasn't just looking for HR competency. They needed someone with genuine executive presence, the kind that earns a seat at the table rather than waiting for one. The incoming CHRO would need to build credibility fast in an environment where HR had historically been seen as a problem rather than a partner.

When I mapped the market, two compounding challenges emerged:

• The strongest candidates, those with the right healthcare background and the right depth of experience, were outside the approved compensation range. Not marginally. Materially.

• Of the candidates who fit the compensation profile, many lacked the executive presence the role required. Relevant industry experience is learnable. The ability to lead credibly at the C-suite level is not something you acquire on the job.

The organization faced a real choice: adjust the budget, adjust the criteria, or accept a suboptimal hire. I recommended a different path entirely.

The Strategic Pivot

Rather than continuing to search within a compressed and misaligned market, I reoriented the search toward high-potential step-up candidates, senior HR executives at the VP and Senior Vice President level who had demonstrated CHRO-caliber leadership but had not yet held the title.

This was not a compromise. It was a deliberate reframe grounded in what the market was actually telling us. The title matters less than whether a candidate has made the decisions, managed the complexity, and carried the organizational weight the role demands. We were looking for evidence of readiness, not a matching credential.

That shift meaningfully expanded the candidate pool and raised its overall quality.

The Outcome

One candidate stood apart. She had held VP and Senior VP HR roles across multiple healthcare organizations and brought precisely the executive presence and strategic instincts the role required. The stakeholder team reached a unanimous decision.

That unanimity matters. In complex organizations with strong executive personalities, a hiring decision without full alignment rarely holds. This one did.

The CHRO placement opened the door to something more significant. Having built trust with the organization through the search process, I was engaged to build out the broader HR leadership team. Over the course of the engagement, five additional HR leaders were placed: a Vice President of Human Resources, a Director of Compensation, a Director of HR Operations, a Senior HR Business Partner, and a Compensation Analyst.

What began as a single executive search became a sustained organizational talent partnership.

The most consequential decisions in a search are not always about finding the candidate. Sometimes they are about reframing what you are looking for and having the market knowledge and client trust to make that case convincingly.

When the talent market doesn't fit the profile, the answer is not to lower the bar. It is to rethink where you are looking, why, and recalibrate on what good looks like in the leaders who will move the organization forward.

The Situation

A private equity-backed portfolio company retained me to find a new Chief Human Resources Officer. The search was confidential. The incumbent was still in the role, which meant the process had to move with discretion at every stage and stakeholder communication had to be managed carefully throughout.

The company operated across multiple sites and had grown significantly through acquisitions. More M&A was expected. The leadership team was looking ahead, and they understood that the CHRO they needed was not the one they currently had.

The issue was not HR competency in the narrow sense. The issue was how HR had positioned itself inside the organization. The function had come to be seen primarily as a policy enforcement body, a place where rules lived, not relationships. Site leaders operated at a distance from HR, and HR operated at a distance from them. The gap was costing the business.

The Real Challenge

In my intake conversation with the CEO, the job description quickly fell away. What he described was something more specific and harder to fill than a standard CHRO profile.

He needed someone who would actually show up. Not just at the corporate level, but at the sites. Someone who understood that in a decentralized, multi-location business, trust is built in person, over time, with people who are watching whether HR is an ally or an obstacle. The current leader rarely visited the sites. That was its own message.

He also needed someone with real fluency in M&A environments, not theoretical exposure, but experience operating through transactions, integrating acquired workforces, and maintaining cultural continuity under pressure. The company had been growing through deals and intended to keep doing so.

I asked a lot of questions. The job description described a role. The conversation described a leadership challenge. Those are not the same thing, and understanding the difference is what makes the search useful.

The Approach

I went to market with a clear mandate and assembled a strong slate of candidates, HR executives with experience in PE-backed environments, decentralized operations, and acquisition-heavy growth contexts. The talent was out there.

But as I built the slate, I kept thinking about a conversation I had roughly three months earlier with an HR leader who had stayed with me for reasons I hadn't fully articulated at the time. He had deep experience supporting large, geographically dispersed employee populations. He had led HR through multiple acquisitions. And what distinguished him from other executives I had spoken with was something harder to quantify: he had a way of building trust with people in operational environments who were historically skeptical of HR. That quality is not on a résumé. You hear it in how someone talks about their work.

When the CEO described what he was looking for, I heard that conversation again. I made sure this executive was part of the slate.

The Outcome

He was not the CEO's first choice. He was not selected for the first round of interviews.

After the initial conversations concluded, the CEO wanted to see more candidates. Based on my read of what the role actually required and what I knew about this executive, I advocated directly for his inclusion in the next stage. Not as a fallback. As a candidate I believed was genuinely right for the problem they were trying to solve.

Once he was in the room, he earned it. His approach to relationship-building, his instincts in M&A environments, his willingness to be visible and present across locations, everything the CEO had described as essential was something this candidate had actually done. The offer went to him.

The search concluded with a CHRO placed whose leadership style matched not just the job description, but the underlying organizational challenge the company needed to address. A confidential process, conducted with discretion and completed successfully.

The most important moment in this search was not the placement. It was a conversation that had taken place three months before the search began. A deep executive network is not a database. It is a living body of relationships, built over years, with real people whose capabilities and character you have come to know. When the right moment arrives, that knowledge surfaces. The candidate who ultimately earned this role was not found through a search. He was remembered. That is what a network, genuinely built and actively maintained, actually makes possible.