Senior Search · Senior Counsel · Senior Documents
The last time you moved, the market came to you.
A call came, or an approach over lunch. That is how every senior move in your career has happened, which means you have never actually had to run a search at this level. Now the phone is quiet. The advice online contradicts itself by the hour, and the field you are competing in is global. More effort will not move it. The game changed while you were busy doing the job, and nobody hands a candidate the current rules. Mark Ross Roberts spent thirty years on the hiring side of those decisions. Headhunters International puts that knowledge behind you and leads the campaign with you, until you are in the role you are aiming at.
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Years International Experience
30,000
Hours Board-Level Negotiation
10,000
Hours Executive Coaching
4
Published Books
The Mechanism
What nobody tells you about how senior appointments get decided.
Three things are true about the senior market and almost nobody inside it will say them to a candidate.
01
The advert comes last
Senior roles begin in private events. A deal completes, a founder exits, a succession plan comes due, and weeks later a role appears in public, by which point the longlist exists and two people have had coffee with the chair. Granovetter's Harvard study found 56 per cent of professional and managerial workers got their role through personal contacts, and a 2025 analysis found 27.4 per cent of US LinkedIn listings showing ghost-job characteristics.
02
The screen runs in seconds
The first screen of your CV runs on title, sector, scale and compensation, in seconds, before anyone reads for value, and the field it screens you against is worldwide. A reader with sixty profiles and four slots is looking for a reason to cut.
03
The search has no governance
This is the one that stings: you would never run a business unit the way most executives run their search, without objectives, without a target list and with no weekly look at what the numbers are saying. So the same approach gets repeated for months, and nothing in it says why nothing is working.
None of this is a verdict on you. It is machinery, and the reason it feels like the market has turned against you is that nobody is paid to explain the machinery to a candidate.
Here is what staying put actually costs. Another ninety days of errands buys you a colder network, a longer gap on the record, and a shorter runway, and runway is what decides whether your next role is chosen or accepted. The executives who take the wrong job do it in month eight, when the standard has quietly dropped, and they end up in something they would not have glanced at in January. Mark Ross Roberts has spent thirty years operating this machinery from the employer's side. Every engagement on this page exists to put that knowledge on your side, with a plan and an expert running it with you.
Sources: M. Granovetter, Getting a Job, Harvard University Press, 1974 (56 per cent of professional and managerial workers found their role through personal contacts). Ghost-jobs analysis, 2025 (27.4 per cent of US LinkedIn listings showing ghost-job characteristics).
Services
Eight services. One principal.
Headhunters International works both sides of senior appointments. Companies retain the practice to find and secure leaders, and the company pays that fee, as it always has in search. Executives engage the practice for counsel and representation, and there the executive is the client and the work is done for him alone. Every engagement of either kind is conducted personally by Mark Ross Roberts.
Flagship · Retained
Reverse Headhunting
The flagship programme. Six deliverables built to place a senior professional into the unadvertised market, positioning him so the right organisations come to him rather than sending him out to apply. This is the full programme.
Engagement basis
Retained · For Companies
International Headhunting
Senior and board-level appointments sourced through direct network access. The candidates who reset a company's trajectory are rarely looking, and reaching them takes a discreet, credible approach from someone already operating in the same market.
Engagement basis
Ongoing Engagement
Career Coaching
Ongoing strategic guidance for executives in transition, targeting promotion, or re-entering after a break. Operational strategy for the search itself. The first thirty minutes are at no cost, and whether there is a genuine fit becomes clear quickly.
Free discovery call
Senior Document
Career Memorandum
A board-ready strategic document rather than a CV. The primary deliverable of the Reverse Headhunting programme, also produced as a standalone commission. It repositions the career narrative for the unadvertised market: the decisions, the scale, the context a CV format cannot carry.
Engagement basis
Board Level
C-Suite Interview and Board Selection Strategy
At this level the interview is where a board underwrites you. Capability was settled before the shortlist existed, and the panel is now working out what an appointment costs if you turn out to be the wrong choice. This is preparation for the question the board is actually asking.
£550
Single Session · Mid-Career
Interview Training
Structured preparation for professionals who reach the shortlist and do not convert. The problem is rarely experience. It is how experience gets communicated under interview pressure.
£245
Fixed Scope
Executive CV Diagnostic
A forensic review of how a hiring committee is currently reading the CV, with every risk identified before the live session and a Fix Map delivered within one business day. A diagnosis with the fix mapped. You keep the pen.
£245
Single Session
Executive Focus Session
One subject, pressure-tested. A counteroffer, a resignation conversation, a second-round interview, whatever is on the table this week. Forty-five minutes of direct input, written output within 24 hours.
£245
Mark Ross Roberts · Principal
Both sides of the table. Thirty years. Every engagement personally led.
For thirty years Mark Ross Roberts has worked both sides of the hiring process, placing board-level talent and counselling the executives being placed. Most search firms see one side of it, and few coaches have ever sat in a hiring committee. Holding both, at the volume and seniority these engagements have run at, produces a different quality of judgement.
The principal-led model is an operational constraint. Mark Ross conducts every search and advisory engagement personally. You are not passed to an associate after the first call. The person you brief is the person who does the work, from initial scoping to signed contract or delivered output. That limits capacity by design, and it removes the quality loss that happens when senior work is handed mid-engagement to someone who was not in the room when the brief was set.
Designations
FMVA, Financial Modeling and Valuation Analyst. CBCA, Commercial Banking and Credit Analyst. Both issued by the Corporate Finance Institute and verifiable through it.
Wharton School
Executive Education: Executive Presence and Leadership, and Neuroscience in Leadership. University of Pennsylvania.
Harvard Medical School
Lifestyle and Wellness Coaching. Coaching efficacy research informs the approach applied across engagements.
Published Work and Experience
Four books on executive career strategy and senior interview performance. Thirty years international. Thirty thousand hours of board-level negotiation. The credentials sit on top of thirty years of direct practice.
Questions
The questions senior candidates actually ask.
How are senior jobs filled before they are ever advertised?
Through private events. A deal completes, a founder exits, a succession plan comes due, and the search starts through networks and retained firms weeks before anything is published. By the time a role is advertised the longlist usually exists. Granovetter's Harvard study found 56 per cent of professional and managerial workers got their role through personal contacts, and a 2025 analysis found 27.4 per cent of US LinkedIn listings showing ghost-job characteristics.
Why is my executive job search not working?
Almost always because it is being run as a pile of errands rather than as a campaign. An executive who would never run a business unit without objectives, a target list and a weekly review runs his own search with none of them, so he cannot tell a weak proposition from poor access from insufficient volume, and the same approach gets repeated for months because nothing measures it. Each individual weakness looks survivable. Together they are what is producing the silence. The fix is a diagnosis of which problem you actually have, and then a campaign built and run against it, which is the work of this practice from the first conversation onwards.
Why am I not getting interviews at executive level?
Because the first screen runs on title, sector, scale and compensation, in seconds, before anyone reads for value. A reader with sixty profiles and four slots is looking for a reason to cut, and a document written to be understood fails a screen built to exclude. The fix is legibility at the level you actually operate.
Why do I keep coming second at final interview?
Because at final stage everybody left is credible, so capability stopped being the question two rounds ago. The panel is pricing the risk of appointing you, against a mandate that is usually not the one written in the specification, and a risk nobody raises does not disappear. It defaults to no. Finding those objections and answering them before the final round is a discipline, and it is the whole of the C-Suite Interview and Board Selection Strategy.
Can I look for a new role without my employer finding out?
Yes, and at senior level it is the norm. Most clients are in role when they first write. There is no form and nothing traceable: you email Mark Ross directly, he replies personally, and nothing goes further without your say-so.
Insights
The hiring-side perspective, in writing.
Insight
The Unadvertised Market
Where senior roles actually come from, what the evidence supports, and what the executives who reach that market do differently.
Insight
The Senior CV Question
The specific ways senior CVs fail the hiring committee, before and after they clear the screening software.
Insight
Interview Performance
What interviewers are actually assessing, and why the strongest candidate in the room does not always receive the offer.
Insight
Career Inflection Points
The decisions that determine career trajectory at senior level, and the patterns that cause capable executives to get them wrong.
Begin a Conversation
Engagements begin with a confidential email.
There is no enquiry form and no automated funnel. Mark Ross Roberts replies personally within one business day, scopes the brief, and confirms whether there is an engagement here that makes sense. Senior work warrants a senior conversation.
ross@headhunters-international.comResponds personally · Within one business day · Strictly confidential