Most of what we get asked, in writing. If yours isn’t here, send it our way — the best questions are the ones we haven’t been asked yet.
Executive search is the practice of identifying and engaging senior leadership for roles where the cost of getting it wrong materially exceeds the cost of the search itself — typically C-suite, board, regulated functions, and founding hires.
It differs from contingent recruitment in depth: partner-led engagement, exclusive mandate, longer timeline, smaller candidate pool, sharper diligence.
Three things, mostly.
For corporate clients: C-suite, board, and functional leadership across HR, Legal & Regulatory, Sales & Marketing, Product, Operations, and Finance.
For our global law firm clients: fee-earners from Associate through Partner-level lateral hires.
AI · Data Centres · Energy & Infrastructure (including EVs and energy storage) · Financial Institutions · Fintech · Healthcare & Life Sciences · Law Firms · Technology & Internet · Video Gaming & e-Sports · Web 3.
Each industry has a dedicated partner or senior consultant with operating background in the space, not generalist coverage.
Singapore (HQ) · Hong Kong · Shenzhen · Kuala Lumpur · São Paulo · Ho Chi Minh.
From these six hubs, we serve mandates across Asia Pacific, China, ANZ, the Americas (US & LATAM), and the EU. Most of our work crosses at least one border.
A typical retained engagement runs in three phases:
Each phase has explicit deliverables. The brief, the longlist, the shortlist, and the references all sit in writing — partly so the engagement is auditable, partly because writing forces clarity.
Retained searches: 8 to 14 weeks from kickoff to closed hire.
Executive (semi-retained) searches: 6 to 10 weeks.
Timeline varies with role seniority, the geographic spread of the candidate pool, and how decisively the client moves at each stage. The fastest mandate we ran in 2024 closed in 5 weeks. The longest took 22.
Candidate names and client details aren’t shared outside the immediate engagement team. Search materials — notes, assessments, CV drafts — are stored on access-controlled systems with audit logs.
We sign mutual NDAs for sensitive mandates as a matter of course. For privacy or data-handling questions, write to privacy@pullmanmorrison.com.
We tell candidates what we know — the company, the role, the timeline, what the interview process actually looks like, and where they stand at each stage.
We give feedback after interviews, including when the answer is no. We don’t put candidates into searches where we don’t believe they’ll close. The candidate’s time matters; treating it carelessly damages every future relationship.
Direct, specific feedback on the interview itself — not a generic decline note.
Where we can, we keep the conversation open for other searches in your space. A meaningful number of our placements are people we first met through an unrelated role two or three years earlier.
Clarity at the brief, candor in the search.
We surface compensation realities and market constraints early, not late. We push back when we think a brief is calibrated wrong — better to disagree at kickoff than at offer stage. Most of our clients return for a second search; the ones who don’t usually tell us why, and the feedback gets back into the practice.
92% of retained mandates close in placement. 87% of placed candidates remain in role at 24 months.
Both figures are tracked across the full mandate history since 2019, not curated. We publish the methodology with our annual report.
Four things, in order of importance:
If you have a question we should have answered here, write to us. A partner will reply within one business day — no marketing automation, no long forms.
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