Executive search quality. Flexible engagement. No delays. No handoffs.
Twenty years in finance recruitment, eleven of them running BSR. I built the operating model inside the firm to serve one market: mid-senior buy-side finance in London. One person has run every mandate since 2015, against that model.
Standard recruitment misses the mid-senior finance professionals investment firms need most. Retained executive search, with its upfront fees, only pays back at the most senior hires. BSR exists to bridge that gap.
BSR works exclusively with London's buy-side investment firms across private equity, infrastructure, renewables, credit, hedge funds, real estate, and asset management. Searches run the breadth of the finance function: accounting and control, FP&A, treasury, valuations, investor relations, corporate development, and ESG. From Manager to CFO. Every search is personally led from brief to start date. No handoffs.
The firm operates through a structured methodology called Effective Recruitment. It brings executive search rigour without the retained fee structure. The map already exists. Eleven years of sector-by-sector intelligence on London buy-side finance, kept live and current. Most briefs land on candidates already known. I approach them with a tailored Candidate Attraction Pack rather than a job spec: story-led research on the firm, the role, and the opportunity that lets candidates judge for themselves. Only candidates who pass rigorous vetting reach the shortlist.
Fewer wasted interviews. Faster hires. People who stay.
That gap is where BSR works.
Some roles are routine enough for a contingent recruiter. Some are senior enough to warrant a retained search. Most mid-senior buy-side finance hires are neither. That is the territory BSR was built for.
Different firms bring different briefs. These are examples of the patterns that come up most often: long-term partnerships, function builds, relationships that follow a finance leader across businesses, and work that spans a PE firm and the assets it owns.
Fifteen hires across nine years: group accounting, infra finance, PE operations, portfolio performance, ESG, and strategy. A single firm, a broad suite of finance and commercial roles, built over time without a retained contract at any point. Every mandate earned on the quality of the last.
The craft is knowing which of the four will bear the weight of a specific brief, then reinforcing it before the first shortlist fails.
A CFO running a portfolio company demands a repeatable process for investment decisions. The same CFO will brief a recruiter with no process at all. The buy-side applies structured thinking to diligence, underwriting, risk, and governance. Recruitment is the exception. A relationship business. Intuitive inputs, unpredictable outputs, judged in hindsight.
When Dave Brailsford took over British Cycling in 2003, the team had one Olympic gold in seventy-six years. His thesis: performance is not one thing to optimise. It is the sum of many small, testable components. Measure each, improve each, reassemble into a system that wins. A decade later, sixteen Olympic golds.
Recruitment has the same structure. Four components: Identification, Attraction, Vetting, Hiring Journey. Each has its own discipline and its own failure modes. A weakness in any one compromises the whole.
A live map of buy-side finance in London. 6,000+ professionals across 1,500+ firms. Read every day. Searches start with intelligence, not a keyword query.
Story-led packs that turn passive candidates into engaged ones. A bespoke proposition built for the seat, sent before the first conversation. Candidates engage because the opportunity is laid out for them, not because they know the recruiter.
2026 flagshipStructured assessment that predicts stay-rate and on-the-job results. Not just interview polish. Only candidates who pass reach your shortlist. No wasted interviews, no weak offers, no false starts.
Managed end-to-end, from first conversation to signed offer. The journey becomes a reason the best candidates say yes, not just a filter that stops the wrong ones.
You have a niche role. The candidates for it aren't looking. Generic outreach falls flat, and warm-network recruiting hits the same people as everyone else.
An evidence-led case for your firm, built before we approach a single candidate. It reframes "recruiter message" as "a proposition for one named person." Passive candidates take the call because the opportunity is laid out for them, not pitched at them.
Michael will send you a real Attraction Pack built for a live buy-side brief. No obligation.
The remit is wide. Sector trends, AI in recruitment, what candidates want, the future of work, what makes finance functions work. Subjects Michael discusses, thinks about, and researches.
The old model of buy-side search ran on relationships. Whoever had the Rolodex won the mandate. Attraction is a different thesis: candidates move for the role, not the recruiter. Why narrative-led outreach has overtaken the relationship-only model in the mid-market.
ReadQuarterly compensation update across eight buy-side sub-sectors. Where the premium is widening, where it has stalled, and the two seats that have quietly become the hardest to fill in the market. Built on 142 live mandates and 2,100 profile updates from the BSR CRM.
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