A Fourth Service · By Arrangement Only

The Search Runs From Inside The Organisation.

A delayed hire at a genuine inflection point does not cost money. It cedes the operating window in which the transformation was still recoverable.

Most searches fail not because the market is thin, but because the brief never captured the reality of the role. Forward Deployed Search embeds a Sercxi operator inside your leadership team for the mandate's duration — learning the organisation before the first approach is made.

Mandate Context

Built For

Boards, CEOs and Chairs commissioning a hire at a genuine organisational inflection point — where the cost of the wrong appointment exceeds the cost of taking more time.

Reserved for the most structurally complex mandates across APAC and EMEA. A Sercxi operator embeds inside your leadership team for the mandate's duration and runs the search from within, against the real requirement rather than the written one.

Typical Mandates
Founding leadership, transformation-critical C-suite, roles with no market precedent, hires where prior searches have failed
Sector Focus
Deep-tech scale-ups, regulated FinTech, hyperscaler infrastructure, enterprise AI transformation
Geography
Singapore · Amsterdam · Dubai · cross-border APAC and EMEA
Engagement Model
Embedded retainer · maximum two concurrent deployments · twelve-month placement guarantee

I · The Problem

The Brief Is Never The Brief.

Every hiring manager has a formal requirement and a real one. The formal requirement fits a job description. The real one is shaped by the specific politics of the leadership team, the technical debt on the roadmap, the cultural fractures that aren't on any org chart, and the three people who've already turned the role down and why.

A search run from a distance - however well-intentioned - operates on the formal requirement. It sources against a specification that was written to be legible, not accurate. The candidates it surfaces are defensible. They are rarely right.

Forward Deployed Search dissolves this gap. Before we map the market, we map the organisation.

II · The Method

How It Works.

A Sercxi operator is assigned exclusively to your mandate for its full duration. The engagement has four phases.

Phase One

Weeks 1–2 · Organisational Immersion

The operator joins your leadership team in working sessions, design reviews, and key stakeholder conversations. No search activity begins. This phase has one purpose: to understand what the role actually requires - the operating environment, the unsolved problems, the peer dynamics, and the kind of judgment that the organisation will never articulate in a brief.

Phase Two

Weeks 3–4 · Mandate Definition

We close the gap between the written specification and the real one. The operator produces a Mandate Brief - not a job description, but a precise characterisation of the problem the hire must solve, the environment they will inherit, and the profile of judgment required to succeed. This document becomes the search's north star and is shared with no candidate before it is agreed.

Phase Three

Weeks 5–14 · Targeted Search & Assessment

With the Mandate Brief confirmed, the operator runs a fully engaged search across APAC and EMEA. Every approach is deliberate. We are not mapping the market - we are identifying the specific operators who have solved this precise configuration of problems before. Assessment is conducted against the Mandate Brief, not the job description. Shortlists are typically three to five candidates, each with a full written assessment.

Phase Four

Through Completion · Offer, Transition & Guarantee

The operator manages offer construction, negotiation, and the candidate's transition - remaining embedded through the hire's first ninety days. We carry a twelve-month placement guarantee on all Forward Deployed mandates. If the placement does not hold, the search restarts at no additional fee.

The Interval

If your mandate carries the shape described above, the next step is a private conversation — partner-led, by arrangement only.

Where is your search stalling — the brief, the shortlist, or the offer?

Secure calendar allocation — active or impending cross-border mandates only.

III · When To Use It

When To Use It.

Forward Deployed Search is reserved for mandates where the cost of a wrong hire exceeds the cost of taking more time — roles at a genuine organisational inflection point, where the person appointed will either accelerate or permanently constrain a strategic outcome.

It is not the right model for every search. If your brief is well-defined, your stakeholders are aligned, and the role has a clear precedent in the market, our standard Executive Search engagement will close the mandate faster and at lower cost. We will tell you which applies.

Evidence

250+

Placements delivered

8 in 10

Twelve-month retention

7%

Counter-offer rate

35 days

Median shortlist

6

Concurrent mandates, maximum

Figures reconciled across engaged mandates since 2000. Category norms drawn from AESC and Heidrick & Struggles published averages. Twelve-month placement guarantee on all Forward Deployed mandates.

IV · Served This Way

Who We Have Served This Way.

Four mandates. Four different organisations. One structural pattern.

I

A regional managed services firm scaling across the Gulf.

had missed its annual hiring target two years running. The brief arriving from HR described a sourcing problem. The actual problem was structural: no intake discipline, no ATS, no interview standard, and a recruitment team that had never been properly led. We embedded at the operating level, rebuilt the team and the process simultaneously, and delivered 300 placements inside twelve months - including attrition, annual plan, and a parallel expansion into two new talent markets.

The hiring target was not the constraint. The organisation was.

II

A Nasdaq-listed professional services firm.

was paying external headhunting firms to fill senior roles across EMEA that its internal team should have been closing. The gap was not budget or brand. It was methodology. We embedded within the European talent acquisition function, trained a 25-person sourcing team in advanced digital sourcing, and rebuilt the executive search process from intake to offer. Time-to-fill dropped 20%. The external agencies were removed from the panel.

What the organisation learned about its own hiring patterns was worth as much as the placements themselves.

III

A deep-tech scale-up - no employer brand, no benchmarks, no comparable roles in the market.

needed to hire its founding leadership team from a candidate pool that had never heard of it. There was no job description that could have attracted these people. We joined the executive team, mapped the organisational design, identified the specific operators whose career logic pointed toward exactly this kind of problem, and built the talent infrastructure from the ground up.

The first hires were made before the company had a public profile to point to.

IV

A 120-person technology integrator.

had a CEO spending two days a week interviewing candidates who should never have reached him. The hiring process had no intake filter, no structured assessment, and no hand-off logic. We embedded as operating lead, rebuilt the workflow end to end, and extracted the CEO and COO from the screening process entirely. They returned to decisions that required them. The hiring velocity improved. The quality improved.

The difference was not the candidates in the market. It was the process consuming them.

Partner Note

Harald H.R. Agterhuis, Founder, Sercxi

Harald H.R. Agterhuis · Founder

A placement isn't complete at signature. It's complete when the leader is still in role, delivering, twelve months later — and the board hasn't spent a single meeting relitigating the hire.

Thirty years of cross-border mandates teaches you that most of the C-suite failures I have been asked to review were not hiring failures. They were integration failures — compensation misaligned to market, onboarding architecture missing, no discreet sounding board when the first strategic call went sideways.

Forward Deployed Search is the model that lets us close that gap on purpose. Not as an add-on. As the reason the retention number holds.

Post-placement integration · Compensation architecture · Executive coaching
Read Harald's dossier →

All Services

Four ways to engage.

Forward Deployed Search

- A Sercxi operator embeds inside your organisation to run the mandate from within.

Current Page

— FREQUENTLY ASKED

Forward Deployed Search — Common Questions

Initiate Confidential Briefing

Forward Deployed Search is by arrangement only.

Maximum two concurrent deployments

From the record

“A different approach — unusual, worth trying. In limited time, the required quota was delivered without any concession on quality.”

COO, Dutch enterprise sales — client

Selected testimony from mandates led by Harald H.R. Agterhuis, now founder of Sercxi. Verbatim on LinkedIn; excerpted here. Verify on LinkedIn ↗