A Series B fintech was replacing a departing technical co-founder with a VP Engineering. Previous searches had reached qualified candidates, but every offer had failed. Talhive found that the problem was not sourcing. It was motivation.
A Series B fintech needed a VP Engineering with payments infrastructure depth, India engineering leadership experience, and credibility scaling from Series B toward Series C. Previous searches had reached qualified candidates, but repeated offer stage declines had left the Board questioning whether the profile or the process was wrong.
The previous searches had found viable candidates. The failure happened later. Concerns around equity structure were present well before the offer stage, but they had never been surfaced or resolved. When the offer arrived with those concerns still open, the candidate declined.
Talhive treated motivation as something to investigate, not something to assume.
"Four offer stage declines 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."
A VP Engineering replacing a technical co-founder, who will be asked to build an India team ahead of the next raise, will almost always read equity as a proxy for their own trajectory. 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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