What differs here

What a scorecard for this sector has to account for.

Every search we run starts from the outcomes the role has to produce. These are the things that, in this sector, a generic process reliably misses.

Convergence is real; competence rarely converges

More organizations now place physical and information security under a single accountable executive. Very few individuals are genuinely strong at both. The honest version of a converged search is deciding which discipline the leader must own personally and which they must be able to govern through someone else — and writing that into the scorecard before sourcing begins, rather than discovering it at the offer stage.

Security leaders are judged on things that did not happen

The output of good security work is absence: no breach, no loss, no incident, no headline. That makes achievement-based interviewing close to useless here, because the strongest candidates often have the least dramatic stories. We assess the quality of the decisions and the discipline of the program rather than the drama of the anecdotes.

The incident record is evidence, but not the way people usually read it

A candidate who has run a major incident has been tested in a way most of their peers never have. The useful questions are what the organization knew beforehand, what had been escalated and to whom, and what actually changed afterwards. A clean record can mean excellent work or thin exposure, and those are not the same hire.

Physical security is a labor business before it is a technology one

Guard force management, turnover, training, post orders, proprietary versus contract staffing. Executives arriving from a technology-forward background routinely underestimate how much of the job is workforce management at low margin — and how much real risk sits in the quality of the person standing at a door at three in the morning.

A CISO’s hardest work is organizational, not technical

Persuading a business to accept a control it finds inconvenient. Saying no to a revenue-generating project. Reporting honestly to a board that would prefer reassurance. These are influence and candor problems. Technical depth is table stakes and almost never the thing that fails.

The common failure

The most common failed hire on both sides is the practitioner promoted on technical reputation into a role that turns out to be governance, budget and persuasion. The engineer who became a CISO; the operator who became a corporate security director. The craft was real and the respect was earned. The new job is a different job, and the assessment has to be built for the job being taken.

How we work here

Four engagements, one method.

The method does not change between sectors: a scorecard agreed before we start, the same questions for every candidate, and the evidence written down. What changes here is what we look for, and who we call to check it. How we choose the right assessment for a role →

Engagement	What it is
Executive Search	Retained executive search in which the assessment is the product. A written assessment of every finalist against an agreed scorecard, with the evidence behind each rating and a stated confidence level.
Leadership Diligence	Pre-close assessment of a management team against the operating model at close. Fixed fee, three weeks from access, no placement obligation and no contingent element.
Bench Review	Assessment of your own leaders against the roles the plan requires. A readiness map written so that it can be shared with the people named in it.
Market Mapping	A standalone map of the addressable population for a role: how many exist, how many are reachable, and what your compensation band actually buys. Fixed fee, three weeks, credited against a search.

Before a transaction

Security exposure reliably receives a technical review in diligence and no human one. We assess whether the security leadership can carry the obligations the thesis creates — new geographies, new regulatory regimes, an acquired estate to integrate — and name precisely what they would need to do it. How human capital diligence works →

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Executive search for Security — physical and cyber.