A Senior Partner Owns Your Mandate

Where this comes from

I did not start in recruitment. I came to it through eleven years inside and alongside large, process-heavy organisations — Capgemini, then five years at Citi, and hiring delivered into Deloitte through a vendor engagement, alongside work with Tranxit Technologies.

Across that time I ran hiring at Citi at AVP, VP and SVP level — the officer grades where banks put people who own P&L, run teams and sign things. That was corporate recruiting at volume rather than executive search, and the two are different disciplines. Across that career — Citi, Capgemini and the Deloitte vendor engagement combined — that volume adds up to 400+ roles closed, almost all of it corporate and volume hiring, not boutique executive search. What it left behind is the thing that matters to a search: a working map of who sits where across BFSI, and a calibrated sense of what genuinely strong looks like at each grade rather than what a CV claims.

That matters for one reason. Most people selling executive search have only seen hiring from the agency side. I spent years on the other side of it — inside the organisations doing the hiring, watching what actually happens to a requisition between approval and start date.

• Most searches fail on the brief, not the sourcing. I saw the same shortlist rejected three times because nobody would say out loud that the compensation did not match the requirement.
• Enterprise hiring is slow for structural reasons. Panels, approvals, notice periods. A plan that ignores those is a fantasy — which is why we build the calendar backwards from the start date.
• Volume and leadership hiring are different jobs. The vendor model into a large consultancy showed exactly where the funnel approach stops working, and it stops well below the leadership layer.

Capgemini, Citi, Deloitte and Tranxit Technologies are past employers and vendor engagements, not Talfino clients, and this is not an endorsement by them. Full history on LinkedIn.

Talfino mandates to date

Talfino is early. Rather than dress that up, here is where the practice stands and what we can publish without client permission.

We publish client names only with written permission, and never while a mandate is live. If you would like a reference before committing, ask on the first call and we will seek permission to arrange one.

The team behind the mandate

Partner ownership without capacity is just a slower agency. Talfino works with a mobilized network of market researchers and search specialists, engaged per mandate, which is what makes a 48-hour shortlist a standing commitment.

• The partner takes the brief, challenges it, approaches candidates at leadership level, runs referencing and manages the offer. Judgement work, never delegated.
• The research team maps the market — the named target list of companies and incumbents, verifying roles and tenure, keeping the pool live as the brief evolves. Capacity work, done properly.

This is why we can share a named target list on day two. Mapping to that depth inside forty-eight hours is not something a single operator can do, and not something a database search produces.

What a boutique actually changes

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