What does a headhunter actually do when the local pool is empty, the budget is fixed, or the candidate barely exists on paper? In September 2026 we published three searches on this site that answer the question, each hard for a different reason and each written up with what made it hard and how it was solved.
The Case Studies page collects all three: two Chief Systems Engineers with Top Secret clearance for BAE Systems, cleared engineers for an EU national security project on a fixed budget, and a compiler engineering lead for Nomic Labs, sourced from Meta.
Why these three
We chose these three because they have the shape of the work we are hired for: a brief other firms had declined, a verified shortlist, and a hire who stays and is promoted. In all three the team worked from evidence of each candidate’s actual work, and the same habit now runs our searches for professorships, where our screening runs as code and checks every candidate on the longlist against the university’s job requirements before the first email goes out. A hiring team with a search that looks impossible can book twenty minutes on Natalia’s Calendar.