Sixty years in finance recruitment taught us one thing: the placement fee had to go.
The old model said that couldn't work. We call it SearcHive.
Catherine Turner
Founder & CEO
Ben Davies
Co-Founder & COO
Two recruiters, sixty years combined, building the platform they spent their careers wishing existed.
Six decades of experience
We've led CFO and finance director mandates through IPOs, private equity ownership and distressed turnarounds, and watched thousands of ACAs and ACCAs build the careers to lead them.
We know which skill sets a merger demands, which ones an acquisition breaks, and what it actually takes to sit in the CFO chair.
A market that has evolved
We've watched interim and fractional leadership move from a stopgap to a strategic choice, and ERP transformation and AI move finance from reporting the business to running it.
The skills businesses hire for have changed. The placement fee hasn't.
A new model
The same AI and technology reshaping finance functions could reshape search itself. An industry still charging six figures on instinct and a Rolodex looked, to us, overdue for the same disruption we'd spent our careers advising clients through.
So we combined three decades of senior finance search judgement with that technology to build a better way to hire.
The result? The end of the placement fee.
Our founders
We're Catherine Turner and Ben Davies, two recruiters who've run CFO searches, watched ACAs become boardroom hires, and sat through mergers that rewrote the shortlist overnight. That judgment doesn't come from a database. It comes from doing this, together, for sixty years.
Catherine Turner
Founder & CEOI've spent thirty years running CFO and finance leadership mandates, and I'm still fascinated by the same thing: people, and what makes one leader right for one business and wrong for another.
Thirty years doesn't give you a bigger database. It gives you context.
Ben Davies
Co-Founder & COOI've spent thirty years advising finance leaders through M&A, restructuring and the rise of interim and fractional leadership. That's taught me what separates a good finance team from a great one.
I'm passionate about the technology reshaping finance, built around real human judgement.
A network built over decades
Long before SearcHive became a technology platform, we built a specialist finance network through thousands of conversations and lasting relationships.
People we've recruited. People we've advised. People we've introduced.
The network wasn't built for SearcHive. SearcHive was built around the network.
A network built one relationship at a time. Not one scrape at a time.
More moments from our journey
RECOGNISED ALONG THE WAY
Connected to the finance leaders shaping the market
The CFO Series brings together more than 5,000 senior finance leaders through events, private discussions, market insight and peer-to-peer conversation.
It keeps us close to the issues affecting CFOs today, the capabilities businesses are hiring for, and what the next generation of finance leadership will look like.
We don't observe the market from a distance. We're part of it.
Discover The CFO SeriesExpertise, delivered through technology
Anyone can build technology capable of searching large numbers of profiles. The harder challenge is knowing what to search for.
SearcHive embeds the judgement of decades spent on CFO mandates, M&A and interim leadership into the hiring process, combining that expertise with technology for speed, reach and precision.
The expertise remains. The delivery model changes.
See how SearcHive worksThe future of finance hiring
Organisations should have greater control over their hiring.
Internal talent teams should access specialist finance expertise without handing over the process.
Finance leaders should access the market without paying a substantial fee every time they hire.
Candidates should have greater control over how and when they are approached.
SearcHive was built to make that possible.
Thirty years of dedication to this industry.
This is what it led to.
SearcHive was built to end the placement fee.