01
Role Design
Define the outcome, the work, the Success Profile and what good looks like in the first 90 days, before opening a search.
Best when: The role is new, fuzzy, multi-region or inventing itself in the job post.
For companies
Build the team your next chapter requires.
We partner with niche mid-market companies and enterprises making critical AI hires, where the role, the rubric and the shortlist must be built from scratch.
01The engagement
An engagement runs in four movements, from outcome to offer.
Every stage produces something you keep: a role definition, a weighted profile, an evidence rubric. If the search stops, the design work stays yours.
- 01
Calibrate
Week 0
We interview stakeholders, agree the 12-month outcome and design the role backwards from it.
- 02
Source & evaluate
Weeks 1–2
Direct sourcing and structured interviews run via Pathways Connect, with every candidate scored against the profile before partner calibration.
- 03
Present finalists
Weeks 2–3
Three to five finalists, each with a Decision Pack: profile scores, evidence sources, trade-offs and risk flags.
- 04
Support decision
Offer & beyond
We join debriefs, pressure-test the decision, shape the offer and stay close for the first 30 days.
02Offer stack
Four ways to work with us. Start with role design and add from there.
We separate defining the work from the decision to hire, so no search opens against a fictional job description.
02
Critical Hire
Find and close the right person for a consequential role, with an evidence shortlist, decision support and close support.
Best when: Getting the hire wrong would cost more than the fee.
03
Workshops
Facilitated sessions tied to a real problem: shape roles, align leaders or prepare a team for an AI-enabled operating model.
Best when: The blocker is alignment on the work, not access to résumés.
04
Implementation Team
Assemble a time-boxed team to build and ship the outcome, not a permanent staff-augmentation bench.
Best when: The work needs a delivery team rather than one permanent hire.
How it usually flows
Role Design → Critical Hire when you are ready to hire → Workshop when the room needs alignment → Implementation Team when a crew needs to ship.
03The Success Profile
Every role gets a weighted Success Profile before we open the search.
It states what the role requires, how much each dimension matters and what evidence convinces us. Everyone grades the same paper.
| Dimension | Weight | Evidence that convinces us |
|---|---|---|
| Business & product judgement | 25% | Has owned a P&L or roadmap through a pivot; can narrate a call they got wrong and what changed after. |
| AI fluency in practice | 20% | Can walk through a system shipped with agents or models in production: constraints, evals and failure modes, not a tool demo. |
| Operating range | 20% | Has built process from zero in an ambiguous function; references describe how they operated without a map. |
| Cross-functional influence | 20% | Has established working agreements across product, engineering and the business function the role serves. |
| Team leadership | 15% | Has hired and grown a team; can name someone they developed and where that person is now. |
Weighted profile vs. one candidate
Threshold 7.0 · Illustrative
- Business & product judgement25%8.6
- AI fluency in practice20%9.2
- Operating range20%8.1
- Cross-functional influence20%5.9 · flag
- Team leadership15%7.8
Strong builder, below threshold on cross-functional influence, raised in the Decision Pack before the offer stage, not after.
First 90 days: what good looks like
- A written 90-day operating plan the candidate brought to the table, not one we wrote for them.
- Two working relationships already established across functions the role depends on.
- One consequential decision made and documented using the judgement the profile weighted most heavily.
- A measurable operating baseline the team agrees not to weaken.
04Evaluation & Decision Pack
Two lenses on every finalist, then a pack you can interrogate.
Role readiness: can they do the job as designed? Scored against the Success Profile with cited evidence.
Future potential: where do they compound? Range, learning velocity and how they operate without a map.
Evidence
Profile scores tied to interview, work-sample and reference evidence.
Trade-offs
What each finalist gives you, and what you give up by choosing them.
Open questions
What remains unproven and the next question that would settle it.
Risk flags
Material concerns, their source and how to test them before offer.
Decision Pack · Finalist 02 of 04Specimen
Candidate A-84
Principal Applied AI Engineer
Search day 16 · Scored against Success Profile v2
- AI fluency in production9.4
- System architecture9.1
- Operating range8.8
- Cross-functional influence7.6
Evidence sources
- · Production eval-suite walkthrough
- · Work sample: agent failure-mode review
- · 3 backchannel references
Identified trade-off
Deepest evals fluency in the cohort; least exposure to regulated enterprise rollouts.
Open question
How do they sequence governance review without slowing the shipping cadence?
A human Talent Partner presents every pack. No black-box shortlists, no algorithmic rankings you can't inspect.
05Why teams bring us in
The moment is usually the same: the role matters, the playbook doesn't exist.
A first AI leadership hire, or a gap nobody has hired for before. A miss is expensive and the standard process flies blind.
Consequential roles
Hires that shape the operating model. A miss costs two quarters, not two weeks.
No existing playbook
The job description would be fiction; the interview loop would be vibes.
Thin, hybrid market
The right profile combines disciplines and won't surface from a keyword search.
Operating cadence
Every two weeks: search status, market pay and what we'd change. Each quarter: an industry report on how AI is changing roles and pay.
Start a conversation
Bring us a role that doesn't have a job description yet.
A 30-minute calibration call is usually enough to tell whether the search is one we should run, and how we'd run it.