Insights
Editorials, books and research papers, case studies, and market intelligence from the firm's work. Written for sophisticated buyers and the senior leaders who advise them.
The firm publishes at five registers. Founder editorials introduce the concepts that orient the work. Books and research papers ground those concepts in academic literature. Applied research works single theses from that body through concrete hiring problems. Case studies document how the methodology resolves specific mandates. Executive search guides and market intelligence pieces apply the methodology to particular buyer questions and geographic contexts. Each register serves a different reading purpose, and each links into the others where relevant.
Founder essays
Founder essays on the operational arguments that orient the firm's work. Each piece introduces or develops a concept that the rest of the firm's content refers back to.
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A profile is not a person
The category mistake at the heart of AI-led executive search. Why representational competence is not candidate understanding.
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Why AI maps the talent market but cannot read the candidate
A practitioner's note on the boundary between AI-assisted mapping and consultant-led assessment in senior executive search.
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Culture fit and soft skills are not the same
Soft skills can be learned. Personality cannot. Conflating the two is the most common cause of senior-hire failure.
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The qualitative edge of speed in talent mapping
After fourteen years in executive search, an argument that engagement bandwidth, not assessment rigor alone, is the load-bearing determinant of shortlist quality.
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Why we don't send blind CVs
Forwarding unvetted candidates is not search. What proper candidate context looks like and why shortcuts compound into hiring failures.
Books and position papers
An annual book series and a cluster of position papers — written across organizational psychology, phenomenological philosophy, and analytic philosophy — set out the firm's argument for human judgment in senior hiring. Each is final, peer-citable, and authored by Alessio Montaruli.
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A Guide to Alessio Montaruli's Research Corpus
The canonical map of the corpus — which works are foundational, which are applied, how the concepts depend on one another, and how the philosophy reaches the Proof-First method. The right door into Koinonia, the AI books, Erfahrung, and the position papers.
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Interviewing for Skills and for Identity
The practitioner volume. Capability leaves verifiable traces; identity has to be encountered — and most executive hiring fails because it runs one process for a two-register problem. Interview architecture, reference method, scorecards, and the signed recommendation, with a working instrument at the close of every chapter and an honest account of where the rules run out.
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Reading Between the Times
The philosophical foundation of the AI project. Converting language into vector space converts temporal-existential structure into spatial calculability; AI output is fluent but worldless — a “structural veil.” The book proposes intus legere, situated reading, as the human response, drawing on Heidegger, Husserl, Stiegler, Bühler, and Benveniste.
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Executive Search as Erfahrung
The companion volume to The Vectorized Afterlife of the They. Senior executive search reframed as Erfahrung — the formative undergoing through which a subject is changed by what resists first understanding. Drawing on the German tradition of experience, the Aristotelian inheritance of phronesis, and the hermeneutics of formation.
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Artificial Intelligence Doesn't Exist
The term “artificial intelligence” has detached from the systems it now names. What we call AI is artificial fluency: statistical language generation that is coherent and context-sensitive, but not cognition. The book traces the misnaming from its 1956 origin and argues for “artificial fluency” as the accurate operating term.
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The Vectorized Afterlife of the They
A sustained philosophical investigation of what generative AI is, ontologically. The thesis: AI is not Heidegger's das Man, the “they” of public everyday existence — AI is the vectorized afterlife of the language of the They. Volume 1 of KiTalent Annuals in Research on Executive Search.
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The Capability-Identity Distinction in Executive Hiring
Capability (technical, soft, and management skills) and identity (personality, values, motivation) belong to different assessment registers. The position is grounded in organizational psychology and distinguished from the informal cultural matching critiqued in the sociology of work.
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The Ontological Boundary of Algorithmic Assessment
AI can map the field of public, already-formalized intelligibility. It cannot perform the singularizing judgment required to assess identity-fit in a concrete executive mandate. A phenomenological grounding for consultant-led senior hiring, drawing on Heidegger.
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The Candidate Is Not the Profile
Mapping is not judgment, representation is not assessment, a profile is not a person. Analytic-philosophical grounding for the distinction between AI-assisted mapping and consultant-led identity assessment.
Applied research
Practitioner analyses that apply the research to the questions buyers actually ask. Each piece takes one thesis from the books and position papers and works it through a concrete hiring problem, with the source work cited as the canonical ground.
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Signs Your Business Needs a New CFO
Most companies that need a new CFO do not have a finance problem. Eight signals, which of them are identity and which are capability, and which you can close without a search at all.
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Executive Search and Traditional Recruitment in Doha
The difference is not seniority but the question each process answers. Why a small, interconnected senior field changes how a search must be run, and when recruitment is the better instrument.
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How Retail Executive Search Reduces Hiring Risk
Risk falls when a process produces evidence about how a leader decides rather than what they have run. What a competent retail search actually does, and where search does not reduce risk at all.
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How to Assess a Leader Beyond Competencies
Competency frameworks assess what a leader can do, not who they are in relation to your organisation. The two registers of a senior assessment, what identity evidence actually looks like, and when the framework alone is enough.
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The Market Map Is Not the Shortlist
A market map tells you who exists; a shortlist tells you who is validated, engaged and worth your time. Why the two get sold as one, and what actually happens in the distance between a name on a map and a person on a shortlist.
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Why Culture Fit Gets Missed in Executive Search
Culture fit is missed because it is assessed as a skill when it is a question of identity. Why the interview rewards the wrong signal, why misfit cannot be coached out, and what assessment that works looks like.
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What AI Can and Cannot Do in Executive Search
AI maps the executive market; it cannot judge the executive. Where algorithmic mapping genuinely helps senior hiring, where it fails by kind not degree, and how to use it without the legal and brand risk.
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Why Executive Hires Fail in the First 18 Months
Senior hires rarely fail on capability. They fail on identity: values, motivation and operating style assessed with the wrong methods. A register-by-register analysis of the 18-month failure clock.
Documented engagements
Documented engagements where the methodology was tested against specific operational constraints. Scan by sector, geography, and outcome to find a mandate that resembles your own.
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SectorInsuranceGeographyItaly / PolandRoleSenior specialists
Cross-border insurance talent for relocation to Italy
Ten Polish-speaking insurance specialists sourced for relocation to Italy after an internal process had stalled. Language, relocation, sector knowledge, and passive-candidate outreach combined.
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SectorFinancial ServicesGeographyGermanyRoleFinancial Controller
Financial controllers in Berlin, after two agencies failed
Two Financial Controllers placed in six weeks, below budget, after two prior agencies had not delivered. Brief recalibration plus sector-native direct search.
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SectorReal EstateGeographyMulti-sectorRoleDivision leadership
Building a new business division from concept
Eight adjacent sectors mapped, more than 100 interviews completed, an insurance-and-property synergy turned into a profitable operating division.
Buyer reference
Buyer-facing guides on how to evaluate executive search firms, choose engagement models, and assess what makes a senior search succeed or fail. Practical reference material for CHROs, talent acquisition leaders, procurement teams, and operating partners.
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What is executive search, and how the process actually runs
What separates executive search from recruitment: research-led identification, direct approach to people who are not applying, and assessment in two registers rather than one.
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What is a headhunter, and when do you need one
Why approaching people who are not auditioning changes the evidence available, what the four movements of a search are, and the situations where you do not need a headhunter at all.
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What does an executive recruiter do
The work behind a senior appointment: calibration, continuous mapping, direct approach, two-register assessment, and evidence a hiring group can weigh independently.
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How CHROs and procurement teams should evaluate executive search firms
The procurement guide: capability framework, engagement-model trade-offs, time-to-shortlist benchmarks, and how to separate real differentiators from RFP boilerplate.
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Alternatives to retained search for pre-revenue startups
When retainers are not the right engagement model and what to consider instead, particularly when founder cash conservation is the binding constraint.
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How to choose an executive search firm for confidential hiring
What proper search confidentiality looks like in practice, what it costs, and the operational signals that distinguish firms that can really hold a brief from firms that cannot.
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How to choose an executive search firm for cross-border leadership
Cross-border senior search has structural complications that domestic search does not. A buyer-facing checklist for evaluating firms against those constraints.
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How to choose an executive search firm for a PE-portfolio CFO
PE-portfolio CFO searches have specific operating tempo, value-creation, and exit-readiness constraints. What the search firm needs to demonstrate before signing the engagement letter.
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Retained vs. pay-on-shortlist: a decision tool
A short decision tool for choosing between retained and pay-on-shortlist engagements, based on role profile, market conditions, and the buyer's risk posture.
Featured market intelligence
Original market analysis from the firm's continuous mapping work. Geographic and sector-specific reports on hiring conditions, talent shortages, compensation pressures, and structural shifts.
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Esch-sur-Alzette's steel sector is hiring at the very moment its talent pipeline is thinning
A heritage industry undergoing transition reveals structural mismatch between legacy roles and modern demands.
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Aarhus's IT talent market: a clearance bottleneck that compensation cannot fix
Security-clearance prerequisites for IT roles in Aarhus are constraining hiring even as headline salaries rise.
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Milan's luxury real estate hiring is structurally out of sync with UHNWI demand
Why the buyer market for Milan luxury property is moving faster than the local executive talent supply can adjust.
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Cincinnati's CPG sector cannot hire the executives its own scale demands
A heritage CPG hub where senior commercial talent has thinned even as category complexity has increased.
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Mainz's broadcasting industry is bifurcating into two non-overlapping talent markets
Traditional broadcast vs. streaming-native talent in a city where both employer types compete head-to-head.
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Akron's biomedical sector is hiring globally because its local pipeline cannot keep up
A mid-tier biomedical cluster where the supply-demand imbalance has shifted senior recruitment fully international.
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Abu Dhabi's green hydrogen ambitions are testing whether the talent market can keep pace
New sector, new infrastructure, and a leadership talent gap that capital alone cannot close on the project's timeline.
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Ahmedabad's chemicals and FMCG sectors are hiring against the same shrinking specialist pool
Sector-adjacent demand is concentrating specialist talent demand in a city where supply is structurally constrained.
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Dukhan's oil field operations are competing for talent against a sector that no longer exists in name only
Operating talent in a mature field environment, against a sector identity in transition.
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