Executive search
ACENSI Canada’s executive search covers leaders and experts across all our areas: data, artificial intelligence, consulting, cybersecurity, Digital Factory, infrastructure and cloud, ERP and CRM. We work as readily with the leader aiming for a harder seat as with the company that has to build the team its biggest challenges will require.
Montréal and Toronto · confidential
You want to play in the major leagues
Senior leaders rarely move by answering a posting. They move because someone knew about the seat before it went public, and put them forward at the right moment.
- Talk · Thirty minutes, nothing to prepare. Where you stand, what you are aiming at, what you no longer want.
- Market · What the market looks like at your level: who is hiring, for what, and on what terms.
- File · A file about decisions you made and what followed, not a list of responsibilities.
- Approval · Nothing moves without your go-ahead, one organisation at a time.
- Approach · Your file is carried to two or three tables. It is not circulated.
- Interviews · Preparation for the executive committee and the board.
- Offer · Compensation, variable pay, exit terms, non-compete.
- 100 days · We stay reachable after the signature, through the settling-in.
Build the team your biggest challenges will require
A leadership seat filled badly is paid for in decisions never taken. So the mandate starts from the role as it will need to be in eighteen months, not as it was yesterday.
- Framing · The role as it will need to be in eighteen months, and what that changes in the profile.
- Grid · Criteria, disqualifiers, what can be learned in the seat and what cannot.
- Sign-off · The grid is settled before we look at a single face.
- Mapping · A named map of the market, including people who are not looking.
- Approach · We make the approach, without your project circulating.
- Assessment · Structured interviews, a work sample drawn from your own organisation, references taken by us.
- Shortlist · Three reasoned profiles, each with its reservations.
- Onboarding · Support through the first months, for the leader and the team.
Nothing moves without authorisation
Confidentiality is not an intention, it is a chain of authorisations. A file does not go out without the leader’s go-ahead, one organisation at a time. No approach is made on a company’s behalf without its written consent. And a name given to us does not come back out, mandate closed or not.
Three authorisations, each on record
- Leader’s go-ahead before every approach
- Written client consent before any approach on their behalf
- No name quoted to a third party, during or after the mandate
A search mandate is not posting an ad
Some limits cost mandates and get said anyway, because that is what separates a useful shortlist from a pile of resumes. They are set when the mandate is framed, not discovered along the way.
Set at framing, not discovered later
- Nobody is presented whom we have not met
- A shortlist arrives with its reservations, not only its arguments
- References are taken by us, not supplied by the candidate
- No timeline promised when it depends on a six-month notice period
One market, read from both ends
Both tracks live in the same team, which is what makes it possible to tell a leader which seats actually exist, and a company who is already doing the work elsewhere. What crosses between the two sides is the reading of the market. Never a file, never a name.
The market reading is shared, the files are not
Across all our areas of expertise
The search covers the same areas as the rest of ACENSI Canada. One market, read field by field.