§01A senior search does not, structurally, require six months. The six-month figure is what happens when scoping is rushed, the brief drifts, and stakeholder reviews are scheduled rather than scheduled-around. The work itself, run with discipline, can be compressed to between ten and twelve weeks without compromise on shortlist quality.

§02The first compression lever is scoping. We refuse to take a brief in a single meeting. The first session is a working session — two hours minimum, with the hiring authority and the most relevant peer — to interrogate the brief itself. The output is not a job spec; it is a one-page statement of the problem the hire is being asked to solve. Most briefs we receive have a problem-statement that, once articulated, is materially different from the role title that triggered the search.

§03The second lever is the long-list. We commit to a 36-name long-list within fourteen days of engagement. This is non-negotiable internally; it is the single best predictor of whether a search will run on time. A long-list later than fourteen days is a search drifting into six months.

§04The third lever is stakeholder discipline. We schedule the calibration session — where four or five long-list candidates are reviewed against the brief — before we have produced the long-list. This forces the calendar to bend around the search; in our experience, calendar drift is the single largest cause of timeline overrun.

§05The final lever is the offer. We start preparing the offer at first-shortlist stage — not when a finalist is identified. By the time a finalist emerges, the comp envelope has been pre-cleared with the board, the contract is drafted, and the start date has been pre-negotiated against the candidate's notice period.

§06None of this is novel. The compression comes from the refusal to compromise on any one of the four levers when the inevitable pressure to slip arrives.