An Early-Stage Talent Lead for a Top-Tier European VC

The Challenge

The client is a top-tier European venture capital firm. It invests at Seed and Series A, mostly as lead investor, and its team is made up of former founders and operators who work closely with the companies they back.

Talent is part of that team. It shows founders why executive hires need care, and helps them choose the right search partner when they need one. The firm wanted a Talent Lead, based in the UK, to do this for its newest companies.

The brief asked for 3 things in one person: hands-on executive search experience, the skill to design how senior candidates get assessed, and enough credibility to have hard conversations with founders. The seat was also one lane of a wider team, and the client wanted someone happy to stay in it.

They turned to The Big Search.

Overview of the executive search

• Top-tier European VC, role based in the United Kingdom
• Talent Lead, early-stage portfolio
• July 2023 → December 2023
• VC value creation: portfolio talent phase

Between July and December 2023, The Big Search ran one search for the role and closed it with a hire 151 days after kick-off.

Executive Search Across UK and European Talent Leadership

We searched 4 pools: European start-ups that had raised a Series A or B since 2019, Series B+ tech scale-ups, big tech companies with a European presence, and executive search firms, from the largest global names to boutiques.

The client's interview feedback scored candidates on 5 criteria:

• Founder credibility and confidence: having challenging conversations with founders
• Teaching others how to fish: leaving founders able to run hiring themselves
• Builder and scalability: building assessment tools and programmes from scratch
• Network and partners: knowing which outside search firm to bring in
• Scorecarding and leadership assessment: designing scorecards and assessment for senior hires

We mapped 278 candidates, three quarters of them in the UK.

First shortlist

47 days from kick-off

We also screened 37 inbound applications. None reached interview.

The person hired wasn't the obvious pick on paper. Our own assessment flagged them as junior next to others in the pipeline: they hadn't managed a team or seen scale from the inside. The client interviewed them 3 times between mid-October and mid-November. Both interviewers who wrote feedback scored them 4 out of 5 or higher on every criterion they rated, and after the second interview one wrote that they were "the closest between everybody I've spoken so far." That feedback centred on their assessment and teaching work.

Client NPS

9/10

The Placed Candidate: A Big Tech Executive Recruiter Who Had Run Search From Both Sides

They came from executive recruitment at a global big tech company, where part of the job was bringing in outside firms to run searches and picking the right partner for each. Before that, they spent about 4 years at a London-headquartered search firm, hiring leaders mostly for Series B+ tech companies. Earlier still, they ran hiring projects for early-stage start-ups, mostly at Series A.

• Both sides of search — agency search for scale-ups, then choosing and managing search partners in-house.
• Assessment toolkit — brought scorecards and toolkits from both employers, used psychometrics, and wrote a playbook for executives on assessing candidates against competencies.
• Builder — set up an internal talent mapping project there, close to one the client had started.
• Start-up roots — advised early-stage start-ups on talent strategy and hired for them from junior roles up to C-level.
• Founder credibility — one interviewer wrote that they could see them as a client lead.
• Team fit — shared the client's views on educating founders and was happy to work in one lane of a collaborative team.

The candidate we flagged as junior was the one the client rated closest to the brief.

One search, a first shortlist in 47 days, a hire 151 days after kick-off, a 9/10 from the client, and the hire still in the role in 2026.

Level was the hardest thing to calibrate. Of the 79 rejections with a specific reason logged, 25 candidates were underqualified and 18 overqualified.

If you're building a talent team to support your portfolio, let's talk.