Retained
Executive search
VP and C-level appointments, including confidential and repeatedly failed searches. You see a named longlist before a shortlist, so the brief gets corrected early rather than argued over later.
Senior appointments · deep tech · AI
Retained and exclusive search for leadership, engineering and product appointments in deep tech, emerging tech and AI. Fields where the credible candidate pool is small enough that posting the role achieves nothing.
Retained
VP and C-level appointments, including confidential and repeatedly failed searches. You see a named longlist before a shortlist, so the brief gets corrected early rather than argued over later.
Exclusive
Exclusive mandates, or hiring run as an outsourced extension of your team. Works for a first leadership team after a raise and equally for an established business hiring across several functions at once.
Fixed fee
A written map of the pool: who exists, which labs, universities and competitors they sit in, and what they are actually paid. Useful whether or not you then run a search.
Every engagement is scoped bespoke. A retained search usually runs through these four stages, and at the intro call I will tell you where yours should differ.
Twenty minutes on the appointment. If it is not fillable at that budget or that brief, I will say so and we both stop there.
Written scope: target companies, adjacent fields, pay range, and the two or three things that will actually make someone move.
Names on a page before anyone is approached, so we can correct the direction while correcting it is still cheap.
A small number of people you would genuinely hire, then support through offer, notice and counter-offer, which is where deep tech hires usually fall over.
I am Tom Allen. I run Tallen Consulting from Cambridge, working on senior and executive appointments across deep tech, emerging tech and AI, for companies from first leadership team through to established businesses.
These are fields where the shortlist does not exist until someone builds it. The people you want are not applying to anything. They are years into a problem they care about, and the only reason they take a call is that the person calling understands what they are working on.
I work on a retained or exclusive basis, and on RPO where it makes more sense to run your hiring as an extension of the team than to buy it one appointment at a time. Either way I take on a small number of engagements, which is the reason I can tell a client honestly when a search is not workable as briefed.