For boards and nomination committees
You are allowed to appoint the person who has actually done this.
Committees routinely rule out the strongest candidate on an assumption about the law that turns out to be wrong. In 37 of the 48 markets on this Exchange, no nationality test applies to a director at all — and where a residency rule exists it almost always binds the company’s overall board composition, not the individual you want to appoint.
Opening a mandate on the Exchange costs nothing. Where the search is retained, it is scoped and quoted like any Gladwin board engagement — and where a board only needs an interim leader for a defined window or an advisory engagement, it is scoped as that instead.
Choose the instrument first
Three instruments, and most briefs arrive as the wrong one.
A board that needs advice opens a search. A board that needs an operator opens a board seat. Getting this right at the outset saves a year and, in the failure cases, an appointment.
A statutory board seat
When it is right
The capability has to sit in the boardroom permanently, and the board is prepared to carry the appointment through election, registration and — in regulated firms — regulator approval.
What it costs you
Longest to fill. Highest commitment on both sides. The only instrument that changes the board's composition arithmetic.
21 board seats live →An interim leader
When it is right
The gap is operational rather than governance: an executive has left, an event needs running, or an internal successor needs testing against a real standard rather than against absence.
What it costs you
Weeks to place, but requires work authorisation in every market here — plan the permit before the start date.
6 interim mandates live →An advisory engagement
When it is right
The board wants outside judgement without changing its composition, or wants to work with someone before considering them for a seat.
What it costs you
Fastest and lightest. No appointment formalities, no work permit, no statutory liability, defined end date.
5 advisory engagements live →The objection worth taking seriously
“They will not understand our market.”
Often true, and we are not going to argue otherwise. A director who has never operated in your regulatory environment, your labour market or your shareholder culture will contribute less in the first year than a domestic appointment would, and a board that pretends this away tends to conclude after eighteen months that international appointments do not work.
The right response is not to deny the gap but to price it. Appoint for a capability the domestic pool genuinely does not hold — not for internationalism as an attribute. Sequence the entry so that the learning happens before the accountability: an advisory engagement, or a committee seat, before a full board appointment. And be explicit about the induction the appointment requires, because a foreign director who is inducted properly is productive in two quarters rather than four.
Where the honest answer is that the domestic pool does hold the capability, we will say so. That answer costs us a mandate and is the reason a chair takes the next call.
What we do before a search starts
- Read the board's own composition arithmetic — independence thresholds, tenure expiries, residency and gender rules — so the specification is written against what the board may lawfully do next, not against a wish list.
- Name the capability rather than the profile. 'A director who has made a materiality call on a live cyber incident' is a search; 'a technology director' is a shortlist of people who can describe technology.
- State whether the capability exists domestically. If it does, the international brief is the wrong instrument and we say so.
- Agree the entry sequence — advisory, committee, or straight to the board — before any candidate is approached.
- Set out the appointment formalities for the market, in order and with realistic timings, so the board is not surprised by a regulator's three-month approval window.
Opening a mandate
What we need from you, and what it costs.
Listing a mandate on the Exchange costs nothing. Where the search is retained it is scoped and quoted like any Gladwin board engagement; where the need is an interim leader or an advisory engagement it is scoped as that instead.
What we need
- The problem in front of the board, in plain terms — not a role profile
- The market and the entity type, because the appointment formalities follow from those
- Whether the brief may be published with the organisation named, or only as an archetype
- Your composition constraints: independence thresholds, tenure expiries, residency and diversity arithmetic
- The timetable that actually governs — an AGM, an election cycle, a regulator's approval window
How your brief appears on the board
- Confidential by default. The organisation is shown as an archetype — a description precise enough to be useful and vague enough to identify nobody.
- Every card states its provenance, so a candidate knows whether the sponsor is signed. We do not describe an unsigned brief as a retained mandate.
- Compensation is stated as you state it, in local currency. Where you would rather not publish it, the card says so rather than omitting the line.
- The cross-border position is stated explicitly: whether a non-resident appointee will be considered, and why.
For boards and nomination committees
Start with the problem, not the profile.
Opening a mandate costs nothing, and the first conversation is about what the board is actually trying to solve — which is where most cross-border searches go wrong, long before a candidate is ever approached.