Retained search
Heads of function, incoming partners, and operators who sit next to a board. Exclusive instruction, staged fees, weekly written updates.
Professional recruitment for London roles that cannot leak.
Metropolitan is a Covent Garden firm for finance, legal, property and corporate affairs. We run retained searches with a written plan, a small shortlist, and approaches that assume the current employer is still in the building.
WC2Shelton Street office
4practice desks
3–5names on a typical slate
2 daysreply to correspondence
What we will not do
Volume preferred-supplier lists, junior volume desks, and “just send me twenty CVs” are a different industry. We decline them so the work we accept stays quiet and precise.
Confidential replacement
When a principal is leaving and the market must not hear it from us. Approaches are made under our name unless you instruct otherwise.
Mapped contingent
Used only when the role is visible and the specification is tight. We still cap the slate. We do not compete on inbox volume.
Candidate counsel
A private book for people who will move once, not weekly. Your CV is not circulated without a sentence of consent.
London is loud. The hire should not be.
Boards are tired of sixteen-person slates assembled overnight. The fourth name on those lists is usually a failure of nerve, not of market. We would rather return three people we can defend in a room than ten we met on a screen.
Our office is at 71–75 Shelton Street, among workshops rather than a glass atrium, because the work is conversation and paper. Clients leave with a map of who is movable and who is not — including why the obvious name is often the wrong one.
Practices
Finance. Controllers, FP&A, audit alumni and boutique CFOs who can explain a year in a paragraph.
Legal. General counsel, deputy GC and professional support lawyers. We do not fish junior seats.
Property. Development, asset and agency leadership for portfolios that prefer not to be named in print.
Corporate affairs. Communications, public affairs and chiefs of staff when a chair needs a voice that will not thrill a journalist.