Services
Every engagement starts in the same place: a real conversation about the role, the market and what great would actually look like. What follows depends on whether you need one person, a founding team, sustained capacity or a better system.
01
Executive and difficult individual hires
For companies with a single role that changes the trajectory of the business, where the obvious candidate pool does not contain anyone who has done it before.
OutcomeA hire made from a market you had not thought to search, with the reasoning written down.
Explore our services, Critical Search02
Founding and formative team building
For early-stage companies assembling the engineers, scientists and operators who will define what the company is capable of.
OutcomeA hiring sequence you can defend to your board, and the first hires made against it.
Explore our services, Origin Team03
Hands-on recruiting capacity during a hiring surge
For scaling teams hiring in volume without a full internal talent function, or covering a gap before one exists.
OutcomeSustained hiring throughput, and a process your internal team can inherit.
Explore our services, Embedded Talent Partner04
Hiring strategy, sequencing and assessment systems
For founders and investors whose recruiting problem is really a design problem: roles that will not convert, offers that keep getting declined.
OutcomeA levelling, compensation and interview system your hiring managers actually run.
Explore our services, Talent Architecture01
Executive and difficult individual hires
A retained search for one role, run on direct outreach and a written map of the market rather than a database query.
Most of the strongest candidates in these markets are not looking, have never heard of the company, and will only take the call if the first conversation is technically credible. That is the work.
Week one
A scoping session, then a written role definition and market map. If the role cannot be filled as written, you hear it now rather than in month four.
Weeks two to four
Outreach begins. You get a weekly written update covering who has been approached, who is engaged, and what the market is telling us about the role.
Shortlist
A small number of candidates, each with a written assessment against the scorecard and a clear statement of the risk in hiring them.
Offer and close
Terra runs the offer conversation with you, including equity framing, and stays involved through the first ninety days.
02
Founding and formative team building
Search combined with sequencing. Terra works with founders on which roles to open, in what order and against what bar, then runs the searches that follow.
The earliest hires decide what standard becomes normal and who the next fifty people will be willing to work for. Getting the order wrong is expensive in a way that does not show up for eighteen months.
Sequencing
Before any search opens, a working session on which capabilities must exist before others can be productive, and which can be deferred a quarter without cost.
Infrastructure
Scorecards, interview loops and a compensation framework, built while the bar is still easy to hold.
Concurrent searches
Several roles run in parallel with a single weekly review, so you are not managing four separate processes.
Handover
You keep the frameworks. They become the template for the hires you run yourself.
03
Hands-on recruiting capacity during a hiring surge
A senior recruiting operator working inside your team on a defined weekly commitment. They sit in your stand-ups, use your systems and represent your brand in the market.
This is capacity with judgment, not an extra pair of hands. The person embedded has run these searches in hard-tech environments before.
Set-up
A week to learn the product, the roles and the standard, then straight into live requisitions.
Ongoing
Weekly pipeline review, a written update, and a recruiter who is genuinely part of the team rather than an outside vendor.
Exit
Documented process, populated ATS and a handover to whoever takes it on. The engagement is designed to end.
04
Hiring strategy, sequencing and assessment systems
The layer above search: how roles are defined, how decisions get made, how people are levelled and paid, and how the company explains itself to talent it has not met yet.
A role that has not converted in five months usually cannot be filled as written. A team that keeps losing candidates at offer stage usually has a compensation philosophy it has never articulated.
Diagnostic
A review of the full process from first contact to offer, including the recent declines. This usually locates the problem in week one.
Design
Frameworks written and agreed with your leadership team, not delivered as a deck.
Adoption
Hiring manager training so the system is used. A framework nobody runs is worth nothing.
How Terra works
Most difficult searches are difficult because the role has been written for a person who does not exist. We start by fixing that.
A written view of where the talent genuinely sits, including the adjacent industries most companies never think to look in.
Direct, researched, individual outreach. The strongest candidates are not applying, and they can tell a template at a glance.
What someone did at a company with three thousand engineers tells you very little about what they will do with eleven.
Offer strategy, equity framing and the first ninety days. An accepted offer is not the same as a successful hire.
Fit
Pre-seed through growth, with particular strength at seed and Series A where founding and early leadership teams are still forming.
Technical founders bringing in their first commercial leader, or first-time CEOs hiring a VP who has done it at scale.
New categories, hybrid disciplines and jobs that have not existed long enough to have an obvious talent pool.
Platform and talent teams who need judgment on hiring quality across several companies at once.
Questions
Contingency firms are paid to submit résumés quickly and are structurally rewarded for volume. Terra works on retained and embedded engagements, which means the work starts with defining the role properly and mapping the market before anyone is approached. On critical hires, that difference is the whole job.
The centre of gravity is climate and hard technology: advanced energy, industrial decarbonization, manufacturing and materials, aerospace and electrification. Terra takes on adjacent deep-tech work where the hiring problem has the same shape, meaning unusual roles, small talent markets and high consequence.
It depends far more on the rarity of the profile than on the seniority of the title. Terra gives a realistic view at the outset, including where the market is thin and what would need to be traded to move faster.
Frequently. Terra is often brought in for the two or three searches an internal team cannot run in parallel, or to build the process infrastructure a new talent lead inherits.
Talk to us anyway. Some of the most useful conversations happen before there is a budget for search, and advisory work on sequencing is often the higher-leverage first step.
Let’s talk about the role, the market and what great could look like. The first conversation is diagnostic, not a pitch.
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