VP Engineering, Series B SaaS, replacing a departing technical co-founder. How Talhive found that the problem wasn't sourcing, closed the role in 32 days, and turned the equity conversation that sank every previous search into the opening of a shareholder alignment discussion.
The client was a Series B fintech replacing a departing technical co-founder. The incoming VP Engineering needed three things simultaneously: payments infrastructure depth, India engineering leadership experience, and Series B-to-C scaling credibility. That combination is not rare, but finding it in a candidate who would actually accept the offer was the part that had broken three times.
The Board had already lost confidence in the process. Two agencies had been engaged. Four candidates had made it to the offer stage. All four had declined. By the time Talhive was brought in, the company's leadership was starting to question whether the profile existed in the market at all, or whether the brief itself needed to change.
The co-founder was still in the building. Every week the role stayed open was a week the technical direction of the company was effectively paused. The upcoming Series C depended on having a credible VP Engineering named before investor conversations resumed. Getting this wrong a fourth time would not just mean another failed search, it would affect the funding timeline.
The first thing Talhive did was not start sourcing. It was audit the four failed searches. The previous firms had run competent searches. The candidates they identified were genuinely qualified, payments infrastructure experience, India team leadership, scaling credibility. The sourcing was not the failure point.
The failure point was what happened before the offer was made. All four candidates had concerns about equity structure that were never surfaced, never tested, and never addressed before the formal offer landed. When the offer arrived without those concerns resolved, the candidates declined. The process had been running motivation as an assumption rather than a variable to investigate.
"Four offer-stage dropoffs look like bad luck. They are almost always the same thing: a concern that was present from the first conversation that nobody asked about directly."
The Role Manifesto Talhive built at brief stage identified equity as a closing variable before the search began, not because of the four prior declines specifically, but because a VP Engineering replacing a technical co-founder at a Series B, who will be expected to lead a India team build ahead of a Series C, will almost always evaluate equity as a proxy for their own trajectory and alignment. That question belongs in the first substantive conversation, not at the offer stage.
"The hire went on to build a 40-person India engineering team in 18 months and led the company's infrastructure rebuild ahead of a successful Series C close. The equity conversation that sank the previous searches became the opening of a shareholder alignment discussion."
TALHIVE MANDATE RECORD, EXECUTIVE SEARCH, SERIES B FINTECH, UKIf this situation resembles what you are dealing with, a search that has already failed once, a brief that hasn't been tested against the market, or a VP-level hire where motivation is being assumed rather than validated, that is a useful starting point for a conversation.
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