Adastrum is a London executive search and leadership advisory firm. We appoint chief technology officers, chief information officers, chief product officers and the transformation leadership around them, for boards, chief executives and investors in businesses that are growing quickly or changing shape.
The technology appointment is usually the one a plan turns on. It is also the one where the strongest CV and the right leader are least often the same person.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentRetained executive search means we are engaged to solve a defined problem rather than to fill a vacancy. We map the whole relevant market rather than the part of it that happens to be looking, approach leaders confidentially, assess them against the problem, and stay involved through the offer and the first hundred days.
We are retained by boards, chief executives, chief people officers and private equity operating partners in businesses that are scaling, changing operating model, or working a value creation plan against a hold period. Before we open a search we agree one thing with you: what problem this appointment has to solve. Everything else follows from that answer.
Technology briefs arrive in different language depending on who writes them. In practice they reduce to a small number of underlying problems, and it is the problem, not the job title, that determines the leader you need.
We are retained to appoint permanent and interim technology leadership, including
Where you need a permanent appointment we run a full retained search, typically eight to twelve weeks from briefing to accepted offer. Where you cannot wait that long, our interim technology leaders can be in the seat within days. We are not a contingent agency, we do not work below director level, and we do not fill volume engineering roles. If that is the brief, we will gladly point you to someone better placed to help.
Five stages, run the same way on every mandate. The timings are the ones we work to, not the ones that read well.
Stage 1
Before we go to market we establish what this appointment has to change, what the board has already tried, and what the organisation will let a new leader do. We will challenge a specification that describes a job nobody is actually being asked to do. A brief that does not reflect the real problem is the most common reason a search fails, and it fails slowly, which is worse.
Stage 2
We map the relevant market comprehensively rather than selectively: the leaders already doing the job elsewhere, the ones in adjacent industries whose experience transfers, and the people who are not looking and will not answer an advert. We spend as much time understanding the environment that shaped a leader as the logos on their CV.
Stage 3
We approach every candidate personally and confidentially. Assessment is a subject-matter conversation between peers, not a scripted competency exercise, because a senior leader can rehearse the second and cannot fake the first. Each shortlisted candidate receives a written assessment mapped against your problem, covering track record, behaviour under pressure and the risks attached to appointing them.
Stage 4
We present three to five candidates with our recommendation, the trade-offs between them, and what we would do if it were our decision. We do not rank candidates to you before you meet them, because the ones ranked second and third then walk into the room on the back foot and you lose the comparison you were trying to make.
Stage 5
We manage the offer, the counter-offer and the notice period, then stay close to the leader and the sponsor through the first hundred days. Most appointments that fail were identifiable in the first quarter. The cost of an honest conversation at week eight is a fraction of the cost of replacing someone at month twelve.
A strong CV from a well-known technology business is a safe-looking choice in a board pack. It tells you what someone has been part of. It does not tell you how they will lead when the programme slips, the board loses patience, and two of your best engineers resign in the same fortnight.
Working with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, we assess how a leader operates when the room is calm and, more usefully, what they reach for when it is not. Those defaults are developable rather than fixed, which is the point: a leader who can see their own can regulate it, and an organisation that knows about it can support them. It is the difference between an appointment that compounds and one that quietly comes apart around month twelve.
We place across sectors on purpose. The pattern recognition that changes an outcome usually travels better from outside an industry than from within it, because the people inside a sector have often arrived at the same answers as one another.
A leader who has already turned a feature factory into a real product organisation, or already run engineering at pace under investor scrutiny, carries that judgement with them whatever industry earned it. We map the market inside and outside yours, and we let the problem decide where the right leader comes from. Where sector knowledge genuinely is the constraint, we will say so.
Adastrum brings twenty years of appointing senior leaders into complex organisations, a behavioural assessment method developed with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, and our Meta Team programme, which has worked with leadership teams at organisations including Nasdaq, Novartis, HSBC, Unilever and EQT.
It is retained search for senior technology leadership. A firm is engaged to define the problem, map the market, approach and assess candidates confidentially, and manage the appointment through to onboarding. It is distinct from contingent agency hiring, which is paid on placement and works from a job specification rather than a business problem.
Before your next senior technology appointment, one question is worth sitting with. Are you about to hire someone who knows what good looks like, or someone who has actually built it?
If that is a conversation worth having, it is exactly the one we welcome.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentObservations from twenty years of appointing leaders into complex organisations: what separates an appointment that compounds from one that quietly comes apart, why succession plans drift towards the most visible candidate, and what a board ought to ask before it signs off the brief.
The Collaborator is the schema you appoint to make a divided organisation move as one. It is also the one most likely to keep seeking agreement long after the moment for agreement has gone. The most dangerous phrase in a senior team is not “I disagree.” It is “let’s get everyone aligned first.” I watched a leader run a good business into a wasted quarter on that phrase, and almost nobody in the room could see it happ
The most expensive senior appointment I have watched fail had the best roadmap I have ever seen. I mean that sincerely. It was a genuinely impressive piece of thinking. Every workstream mapped, every dependency identified, governance and sequencing and risk all accounted for. The board saw it in month three and applauded. He was still refining it in month fourteen, when they let him go.
The Commander is the schema you appoint in a crisis. It is also the one you have to watch once the crisis has passed. There is a phrase you hear in big organisations when nothing is moving. "It's just how things get done here." Say it out loud and it sounds like culture. Listen properly and it is something sharper. It means someone at the top is commanding, and everyone below has quietly learned to wait.
The board thought they had found the perfect CEO. Two successful exits. A scaled multinational division. References that read like a character witness: decisive, commercially sharp, a natural leader. In the interview he was confident, fluent, convincing on growth and culture and transformation. The appointment was unanimous. Twelve months later the same board was negotiating his exit. Revenue targets had been missed.
There’s one question almost every HR-led interview process insists on. “Tell me about a time you failed.” At junior level, it sometimes earns its keep. At C-suite, it’s a junk question. And it’s almost always the wrong thing to ask in the room. I’ll explain why I won’t ask it. And then I’ll tell you what I ask instead.
Most succession planning assumes someone is ready to step up. But what happens when the obvious successor is the one who leaves? A look at why heir apparent plans fail, the real cost of an unplanned leadership transition, and how boards build genuine continuity.
