A delayed hire at a genuine inflection point does not cost money. It cedes the operating window in which the transformation was still recoverable.
Many difficult searches stall 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 engagement · one-month replacement 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: 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. Every engaged mandate carries a one-month replacement guarantee: if the hire leaves within the first month in role, we run one replacement search 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
- Completed engaged mandates
- 250+
- Twelve-month retention
- 8 in 10
To shortlist
21 working days
Median to offer
35 working days
Figures reconciled across engaged mandates since 2000. One-month replacement guarantee on all engaged mandates.
IV · Served This Way
Who We Have Served This Way.
Four mandates. Four different organisations. One structural pattern.
I
Mandate 01
01
A regional managed services firm scaling across the Gulf.
had missed its annual hiring target. 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 needed clearer leadership. We embedded at the operating level and rebuilt the team and the process to support the hiring plan and expansion into new talent markets.
The hiring target was not the constraint. The organisation was.
II
Mandate 02
02
A Nasdaq-listed professional services firm.
was using external headhunting firms to fill senior roles across EMEA that its internal team wanted to own. The gap was methodology. We embedded within the European talent acquisition function, trained the sourcing team in advanced digital sourcing, and rebuilt the executive search process from intake to offer.
What the organisation learned about its own hiring patterns was worth as much as the placements themselves.
III
Mandate 03
03
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
Mandate 04
04
A technology integrator.
had a CEO spending time interviewing candidates who should not have reached him. The hiring process had no intake filter, no structured assessment, and no hand-off logic. We embedded as operating lead and rebuilt the workflow end to end, so the CEO and COO could focus on appointment decisions rather than initial screening.
The difference was not the candidates in the market. It was the process consuming them.
Partner Note
\ Harald H.R. Agterhuis · Managing Partner
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.
Twenty-five 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 lets us address integration deliberately, with the priorities and follow-up agreed as part of the mandate.
Post-placement integration · Compensation architecture · Executive coaching
All Services
Four ways to engage.
Executive Hiring Lab\ - Transfer executive search methodology to your internal TA team.\ \ →
AI Capability Assessment\ - Two weeks of precision diagnostic before your search begins.\ \ →
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
01
How confidential is a Forward Deployed engagement?
02
How is this different from a retained executive search?
03
What happens if the placement does not hold?
Discuss a search
Forward Deployed Search is by arrangement only.
Singapore · Amsterdam · Dubai
Partner Line · Amsterdam, all corridors
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
Curated excerpts from LinkedIn recommendations about Harald H.R. Agterhuis, Managing Partner of Sercxi. Wording is excerpted and lightly reframed; attributions are anonymised. These are personal recommendations, not independently audited Sercxi results. Read original recommendations on LinkedIn ↗