Mandate & Leadership Architecture Transfer
Turn every senior hire into a competitive advantage — without outsourcing every senior search.
Instead of outsourcing every CTO, VP Engineering, or mission-critical leadership search, build an internal executive hiring engine your team owns end to end — live, on-demand, always on.
Mandate Context
Built For
Talent Acquisition leaders and CHROs who commission three or more external executive searches a year and want the methodology owned in-house rather than rented per mandate.
Every CTO, VP Engineering or succession-grade search outsourced is a fee that leaves the building and a capability that never accrues to your team. The Lab transfers the engaged search methodology — briefs, sourcing sequences, interview architecture, offer discipline — so internal recruiters can run board-grade searches themselves.
- Typical Mandates
- CTO, VP Engineering, Chief AI Officer, Head of Platform, succession-grade functional leadership
- Sector Focus
- Enterprise AI, hyperscaler infrastructure, regulated FinTech, cybersecurity, deep-tech scale-ups
- Geography
- Delivered online, on-demand, worldwide — anchored in Singapore and Amsterdam
- Engagement Model
- Application-only cohort · methodology owned in perpetuity by your team
Stop “posting and praying.” Start running engaged executive searches that close.
The Executive Hiring Lab gives your Talent Acquisition team a turnkey, engaged search methodology so they can run board-grade, succession-grade searches in-house — with the same rigour as a top-tier executive search firm. Delivered online, on-demand, 24/7. Your team can start applying the playbooks immediately, from anywhere in the world.
Fill Critical Roles Faster
Compress senior search cycles from a category norm of 84–120 days to a median of 35 to shortlist. Your team learns the same sourcing, calibration, and closing discipline that moves engaged mandates from brief to signed offer in a fraction of standard market time.
Stop bleeding revenue while a critical seat sits empty.
Cut External Search Fees
Every CTO, VP Engineering, or succession-grade hire your team closes internally is a search fee that never leaves the building. One internally-closed senior role recovers the entire programme investment many times over.
Stop outsourcing work your team can own.
Reduce Failed Searches
Built around 100% completion on engaged mandates and a 7% counter-offer rate. Your team installs structured executive interviewing, offer construction, and counter-offer discipline so signed offers actually start, and senior hires actually stay.
Stop the cycle of mishires, restarts, and quietly broken trust.
Six modules. Battle-tested templates, sequences, and scripts your team can plug into live searches immediately.
Every framework lifted from live engaged mandates, not invented in a workshop.
Strategic workforce planning for senior technology roles
Map organisational capability gaps before writing a job description. Workforce architecture, succession planning, and a talent pipeline that anticipates rather than reacts. Specific to CTO, VP Engineering, and senior tech leadership.
Includes a workforce planning template calibrated for technology leadership roles.
APAC AI Engineering Index →Passive candidate sourcing and market mapping
Advanced sourcing for CTO, CIO, and VP Engineering profiles. Boolean architecture, AI-assisted identification, market mapping, and approach sequences that get responses from candidates who delete recruiter messages. The end of job-board dependency.
Includes the Sercxi Passive Candidate Approach Framework.
Explore the Displacement Index →Structured executive interviewing that predicts performance
How to evaluate strategic thinking, organisational influence, and technical depth in a 45-minute conversation. The assessment design that predicts leadership impact, not just likeability or polish.
Includes a structured interview scorecard for VP and C-level technology roles.
Read: 7 Questions That Predict IMPACT →Offer construction that closes senior operators without overpaying
The mechanics of closing a passive senior candidate. Relationship pacing, compensation benchmarking, and offer construction that lands above market only where it matters, and never where it does not.
Includes the Sercxi Offer Construction Framework.
Read: Hidden Economics of Placement Failure →Counter-offer prevention so signed offers actually start
How to anticipate, surface, and neutralise the counter-offer before it arrives. The methodology behind a 7% counter-offer rate in markets running at 28%. Process architecture, decision pacing, and the conversations most TA teams skip.
Includes the Sercxi Counter-Offer Prevention Framework.
Read: Metrics That Predict Impact →The tools and stack that close senior searches
Build your sourcing and assessment stack from Boolean to AI. Which platforms to invest in, which to drop, and how to combine them into a workflow that finds candidates your competitors cannot see.
Includes a curated technology stack recommendation tailored to your team size and market.
Read: Strategic TA in an Age of Automation →You are not buying content. You are installing a method that has already delivered.
Hard-dollar outcomes on real searches across APAC and EMEA. The same system, transferred in full to your team.
Sercxi performance
250+
Placements delivered
8 in 10
Twelve-month retention
7%
Counter-offer rate
35 days
Median shortlist
6
Concurrent mandates, maximum
90% of companies missed 2025 senior-hiring goals; 60% saw time-to-hire rise. Source: GoodTime 2026 Hiring Report; Sercxi internal placement data 2024–2026.
Market Context
Independently-sourced signals from the Sercxi Displacement Index.
Partner Note
Peter van de Graaff · Partner, Executive Hiring Lab
Many of the CEOs I sit with have already commissioned three external searches this year. The question they haven't yet had the room to ask is why the fourth one is being commissioned at all — and that is usually where our first conversation starts.
Twenty-five years as COO, CHRO and board member taught me that most leadership problems are not talent problems. They are clarity problems dressed up as talent problems — an unsharpened brief, a specification the market can't price, a hiring bar the interview loop cannot actually test. Every one of those failures is teachable.
The Lab isn't a discount on engaged search. It's the choice to stop renting the capability and start owning it — so the next senior hire, and the ten after it, are decisions your team makes with conviction, not vendors you keep re-hiring.
Can your team close a passive CTO?
Five questions. No email required. Honest answers only.
Can your team identify and approach a passive CTO who is not on any job board?
Has your team closed a VP-level candidate against a counter-offer in the last 12 months?
Do you have a live talent map of senior technology leaders in your priority markets?
Can your team compress a senior search from 90 days to the 35-day median we run?
Does your hiring manager alignment process prevent scope drift and decision paralysis?
The questions we get asked.
Research
The Intelligence Behind the Lab
The Displacement Index
42 regional reports tracking creation signals vs. elimination risk across APAC, EMEA, and GCC.
→The Great Elevation
Why 2026 is the year of the Orchestrator, and what it means for who you hire.
→Strategic Talent Acquisition in an Age of Automation
Why human judgment remains the scarce resource in executive hiring.
→Hidden Economics of Placement Failure
The true cost of a failed senior hire, and why search fee avoidance is the wrong metric.
→Velocity of Scarcity: Singapore
Local talent dynamics in Singapore's AI and infrastructure corridor.
→The internalisation of executive search requires a transfer of the proprietary methodology traditionally guarded by top-tier firms.
Book a strategy call to see how the Executive Hiring Lab can be rolled into your current Talent Acquisition function and applied to your next CTO or VP Engineering search.
Online, on-demand · Application only · One-business-day response
We respond within one business day. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you.
From the record
“Reads between the lines of a CV. Fit judged on attitude, experience and intelligence — not paper. Will challenge the client to think outside the box when that is what the match requires.”
Selected testimony from mandates led by Harald H.R. Agterhuis, now founder of Sercxi. Verbatim on LinkedIn; excerpted here. Verify on LinkedIn ↗
Embedded RPO That Transfers Method, Not Just Headcount.
Embedded RPO built from 250+ live mandates, transferred to your internal team.
Confidential · 30 minutes · Partner-led · No obligation
Three candidates, every one we would hire ourselves.
Commission a Search
You know the role. You need the operator. Define what this hire needs to unlock.
Begin AI Assessment
Two weeks of precision diagnostics before committing to a search. Know what you need before you hire for it.
See the AssessmentSubmit a brief without your company name. We confirm fit before any details are exchanged.
Request Partner Allocation
A confidential briefing with a resident corridor partner. No gatekeepers, no intermediaries.
Request Partner AllocationSecure calendar allocation — cross-border mandates only.