A confidential conversation first.

We will explain enough about the organisation and role for you to decide whether you would like to know more.

If you are not interested, that is completely fine.

The client is named when there is genuine interest.

We protect the confidentiality of both our client and the people we approach.

Once you tell us you would like to explore the opportunity, we can discuss the organisation and role in more detail.

A proper conversation before anything is written.

If the opportunity is of interest, we will take time to understand your career, what you have delivered, what you are looking for and what you may want to do next.

Nothing goes to the client without your agreement.

No CV, details or assessment is shared without you knowing.

Formal referencing happens later, and only with your consent.

References are normally taken before an offer and personally by the person leading the search.

For appropriate appointments, we use the TDN Leadership Compass to help structure our assessment.

It considers four areas.

Direction. How you think, make decisions and provide clarity.

Delivery. What you have delivered and your personal contribution to those outcomes.

Engagement. How you lead people, build trust and work with others.

Resilience. How you respond when circumstances change or things become difficult.

Character sits beneath all four.

Our assessment will consider strengths as well as areas worth exploring further.

Nobody is perfect and we don’t expect candidates to be.

Where we prepare a written assessment for a client, we will discuss our view with you first.

You should understand how we see you before the client reads it.

Your conversations with us remain confidential.

We do not send your CV or personal information to a client without your agreement.

If your current employer is a client of ours and that creates a conflict we will explain that early.

We would rather be clear at the beginning than create difficulty later.

We also handle your information in accordance with our privacy policy.

Some of our most useful conversations are not connected to a current search.

You might want another perspective on the market, a move you are considering, how your experience is likely to be viewed or where your career could go next.

Where we know the market well enough to be useful, we are happy to share our perspective.

There is no obligation attached.

"Thank you for taking the time to provide such thoughtful and candid advice. Your explanation of how retained search works, the distinction between a base city and the actual employment market, and particularly the need to position myself clearly as an operational leader with deep maintenance and shutdown expertise were extremely helpful. It has given me several important things to work on."

Senior Executive and Director, Mining and Technology Solutions

We are a small specialist firm working on a limited number of assignments at any one time.

That means we will not always have a role relevant to someone who contacts us.

We also don’t want to promise that we will call when something suitable comes up if we cannot be certain that we will.

If we can help, we will.

If we can’t, we will be straightforward with that too.

And where we know someone or somewhere that may be more useful, we are happy to point you in that direction.

We are a small firm and fairly quiet by nature.

Our roots go back to Downing Teal and many years working across resources, infrastructure, industrials and defence.

Every search is led personally by the person who takes the brief.

Over time, that has created relationships with people at many stages of their career.

Some we first met as engineers, superintendents and managers are now running projects, operations and businesses.

We value those long-term relationships.

They are an important part of how we work.