At Talentor, our commitment has always been to combine the reach of a global network with the depth and accountability of locally embedded partners. That is why we are thrilled to welcome L'AGENCE as our newest US partner, further strengthening Talentor's presence in North America and adding a truly distinctive capability to our network. With this addition, our US footprint now covers three partners, deepening our ability to serve clients and candidates across the country with both scale and intimacy.

L'AGENCE is a boutique, AI-native retained executive search and leadership advisory firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 2024 by Michaëlle Gocko Achukwu, an ex-Egon Zehnder consultant and GE leader, the firm specializes in cross-border, modernization, and transformation mandates for technology-driven and innovation-focused startups and small-to-mid-cap companies across North America, Europe, and Africa.

To mark the beginning of this exciting partnership, we sat down with Michaëlle for an in-depth conversation. Read it below:

Hi Michaëlle, welcome to Talentor! We are delighted to meet you. Please tell us more about yourself!

I'm Michaëlle Gocko Achukwu, Founder & CEO of L'AGENCE, based in Atlanta. I've spent over 15 years across global commercial leadership at GE and executive search at Egon Zehnder, working at the intersection of cross-cultural leadership and digital transformation. L'AGENCE is the firm I founded in 2024 to bring that combination together: an AI-native boutique executive search and leadership advisory firm for scaling companies operating across borders and through moments of transformation.

I was born in Brazzaville, immigrated to France at age two, and grew up in Brittany. I'm the fourth of five children, so family is central to who I am. Today I live in Atlanta with my husband and our two sons. Outside of work, we enjoy Atlanta's outdoor spaces, watching movies, travel internationally as a family every year, and I stay close to a community of friends across business and culture. I'm also an avid reader of leadership and personal mastery books and enjoy attending related seminars, the work I do is about people, and investing in my own internal compass is part of what drew me into this space in the first place, and how I stay useful to my clients.

What is your favorite thing about the recruitment and executive search industry?

The decisions we help shape are consequential. When I help an organization name the leader who will define their next chapter, I am sitting in the room where one of the most important calls a company will make is being made. That is privileged work.

Too often leadership decisions are based on incomplete or incorrect assessment frameworks. The chance to bring rigor to that part of the equation is, to me, the most interesting work in business.

There are also two specific moments in the work I love. The first is the phone call when we break the news to a candidate that they have received the offer. A senior partner at Egon Zehnder told me early on something that has stayed with me, that we are in the business of finding people who have no idea their lives are about to change. That call, every time, is a reminder of what is at stake on the candidate's side of the table.

The second is the conversation that follows a leadership assessment, when we debrief an executive on what surfaced. The range of reactions, from quiet light-bulb moments to deeper, sometimes uncomfortable reflection, is where the real value of the work lives. You can see something shift for them in real time. That is rare in any industry.

Underlying both is what I learned working for some exceptional leaders at GE, and even earlier in my career at Corbis in Paris, the kind of managers and leaders who shape how you think about leadership long before you have a framework for it.

Could you share with us a little bit about your beginnings in this industry?

My entry into executive search was not planned. After seven years in commercial leadership at GE, I decided to make a career pivot into career and mindset coaching. I was dedicated to serving international women and Francophone talent in taking control of their careers and lives when Egon Zehnder reached out. The conversation opened a door I had not been looking for.

What followed was a realization: everything I had done before, the cross-cultural navigation, the stakeholder management, the commercial judgment, the work across markets that did not always speak the same business language, was precisely what this work required.

I sometimes describe it as an accidental calling. The path that brought me there was not strategic but it was aligned with everything that I naturally enjoyed learning about, talking about, and doing.

At Egon Zehnder, I advised Fortune 500, PE-backed, and family-owned organizations on senior leadership across North America and Europe. I sat in rooms with boards making decisions about who would lead their organizations through transformation. That experience is what I bring to my clients and what shaped everything I do at L'AGENCE today.

What are the biggest learnings from your career?

• Most organizations dramatically underestimate the leadership variable. They plan for strategy, technology, and capital. They improvise on people. The cost of getting senior leadership wrong is almost always larger than the cost of getting it right.
• Context matters more than scale. The leader who succeeds in one market, sector, or moment of transformation may be precisely the wrong fit for another, even when the resume looks identical on paper. What got someone here is not what will get them there.
• The most consequential leadership decisions happen at a border. A border between what an organization is and what it must become. Between a market it knows and a culture it is learning. Between the leader it has and the leader it needs. The best work happens at the border itself.

• There is a crisp distinction between a manager and a leader. Leadership has dimensions that range from core competencies - what someone does - to self-mastery - who someone is. Both matter, and the best leaders work on both throughout their careers.

Opportunities for leadership are all around us. The capacity for leadership is deep within us." - Madeleine Albright

• Listening is more important than talking. The most important information in any room, what people are afraid to say, what they don't know how to articulate, what they assume everyone already understands, is rarely in the words they actually use. Reading what is happening underneath the conversation is a learnable skill, and one I've come to think is the most underestimated leadership capability.

What led you to found L'AGENCE?

I'll be honest. My time at Egon Zehnder made me realize the reality of the big consulting model. The level of personal investment and the lifestyle it demanded required sacrifices in my personal life that I was no longer willing to make. I was burned out, in my early 40s, and I wanted work to fit my life rather than the other way around. After my youngest son was born, I left to spend time with my family and figure out what came next.

What came next was the realization that I had always wanted to build something of my own. The coaching practice had been the first attempt at that. To own it. To work on the things that matter to me, with the people I most want to work with, on the kinds of mandates I most want to take on. That was not going to happen inside Egon Zehnder, or it would have taken me years to get there.

I am also a deeply digital-savvy person, and I had grown increasingly frustrated working inside a dated technology stack at Egon Zehnder. Simple things took longer than they should have. The inefficiencies cost real effort, real time, and ultimately real client value. When the ChatGPT moment happened in late 2022, I recognized something larger was beginning: generative AI was going to restructure professional services from the inside, and the firms that would win this transition were not going to be the ones bolting AI onto a traditional model. They were going to be the ones that built AI-native operations from day one.

I genuinely believe that being a small, agile firm is the best place to be in this moment. We can experiment, we can onboard the latest innovation coming out of Silicon Valley and the global tech hubs quickly, and we can rebuild our operating model around AI in real time. Large firms are still in their technology and risk assessments, and procurement cycles. We are already in production.

L'AGENCE is built for scaling companies operating across borders and through moments of transformation, who cannot afford to get senior leadership wrong and who need an advisor who will do the work personally without sacrificing global reach.

L'AGENCE defines itself as an AI-native executive search and leadership advisory firm. What does that mean in practice, and how does it shape the way you work with clients?

It means AI runs underneath every search, every market mapping, every assessment we do - not as a feature we layer on, but as the operating system the firm was built around.

Practically, three things change for clients.

• First, reach. An AI-powered intelligence layer surfaces candidates traditional firms miss - diaspora talent, returners, cross-corridor moves, leaders who are not yet on any shortlist but who fit the operating context our client is hiring for. A credible shortlist takes weeks, not months.
• Second, depth of intelligence. The same layer compounds with every engagement. Every market we touch, every conversation we have, every placement we make feeds back into it. Our advisory is grounded in compounding, proprietary market intelligence rather than experience alone. Clients do not just get a shortlist - they get a sharper read on their talent market each time we work together.

• Third, focus. AI handles the parts of executive search that should never have required a human to do them in the first place - research scaffolding, profile aggregation, scheduling, data hygiene. That frees us to spend our time on the parts that genuinely require human judgment: candidate assessment, cultural fit, stakeholder management, the conversations that determine whether a placement will actually hold.

I want to be honest about one thing. AI is one side of the coin. The other is physical presence, on-the-ground insight, and partners who know the local market the way only someone living it can. AI alone is not enough in this work. That is precisely why we joined Talentor - to close that gap.

Your company motto is "Execution is Abundant. Leadership Is Not." Could you walk us through the thinking behind it?

Something structural has shifted in business in the last two years. AI has commoditized what used to be hard. Writing a strategy document is easier. Building a financial model is easier. Producing a deck is easier. Even running a search is easier on the surface, applications flood in, resumes are algorithmically polished, candidates are optimized for the role. Volume is at an all-time high.

Execution, in other words, is becoming abundant.

What remains scarce - and decisive - is human judgment. The ability to read a room, to weigh trade-offs no model can quantify, to make calls about culture, character, and consequence. That is the leadership variable. That is what scaling companies cannot afford to get wrong.

The motto is our way of naming the moment. The firms that will create disproportionate value over the next decade are not the ones with the best AI stack, although that matters. They are the ones whose leaders bring judgment that compounds. Our work is to help find those leaders.

What is a typical profile that you recruit?

We recruit C-suite and VP-level leaders for scaling companies - Chief Executive Officers, division presidents, and functional leaders across Strategy, Commercial, Operations, HR, Finance, Technology, and Transformation roles. We work across technology-driven and innovation-focused sectors where the leadership variable is high-stakes: Energy, Industrial Manufacturing, Automation and Robotics, Life Sciences and Healthcare, IT and Technology, and Financial Services.

The common thread across the leaders we place is that they have to hold across context. A leader hired for technical excellence alone, or international experience alone, or transformation experience alone, will not survive long in the kinds of mandates we run. The leaders who do are the ones who can navigate complexity across all three: technical, cultural, and organizational.

Who is a typical client for you?

Our clients are typically:

• Scaling startups and small-to-mid-cap companies - technology-driven and innovation-focused, often post-Series-B through pre-IPO stage
• Private equity and venture capital portfolio companies facing leadership build-outs at the C-suite and VP level
• Family-owned and family-led businesses navigating professionalization or succession across borders
• European and Francophone-African companies entering or scaling in the US market

• US companies expanding into Europe, Africa, or other cross-border corridors

What our clients have in common is that they cannot afford to get senior leadership wrong. They are too small to absorb the cost of a failed cross-border hire, and they need an advisor who is going to do the work personally, not delegate to a junior researcher after the pitch. They come to L'AGENCE because we offer the rigor of a top global firm with the depth and intimacy of a boutique, and because we bring an AI-powered intelligence layer that traditional firms do not have.

What is one thing you would recommend to companies that not just want to recruit great talents, but also retain them?

Great leaders stay where the conditions for leadership actually exist.

I have come to believe this is the most under-appreciated truth in senior hiring. Companies invest heavily in attracting leaders, then quietly assume that compensation, title, and ambition will be enough to keep them. They are not.

Leaders stay when they are given clarity - on the direction the organization is heading, the scope and mandate of their role, and the incentives that align their work to the outcomes the business actually values. They stay when they are given agency — the ability to build their team, shape the culture they operate in, and influence strategic direction beyond their immediate KPIs. And they stay when there is alignment - between the company's mission and their own values, between what the company says it stands for and what it actually rewards, and between the leadership in place and the talent and succession planning being done around it.

Companies that practice healthy governance, invest deliberately in their leaders' growth, and treat succession planning as a core executive responsibility tend to attract and retain senior talent far more successfully than companies that treat leadership as a slot to fill.

When senior hires leave in months nine through eighteen - which is when most cross-border and transformation placements quietly fail - the cause is rarely the leader. It is almost always the absence of one or more of these conditions.

What surprises foreign companies the most when they are recruiting specialists in the US?

The compensation conversation. In most international markets, compensation is a structured negotiation that happens near the offer stage. In the US, it is woven into the process from the first conversation. Senior candidates expect a transparent compensation dialogue throughout, and reluctance to engage on numbers early often reads as a signal that the role is not serious.

The most consequential surprise is the role of equity and long-term incentives. US senior compensation packages are typically weighted toward equity, performance bonuses, and deferred incentives in ways that are far less common in European or African structures. Foreign companies that bring their home-market compensation framework to a US search often find themselves out of contention before the interview even begins.

The third surprise is just how mobile the senior US talent market is. Average tenure in senior US roles is shorter than in most European or African markets. Foreign companies sometimes assume they can hire and not revisit that role for years. In the US, the question is not whether your senior hire will be approached by competitors. It is when, and how often.

The fourth surprise is the pace and structure of the search itself. Foreign clients sometimes expect a traditional process - kick off, long-list at week three, shortlist at week six. In the US senior market, modern firms work on a rolling basis. We kick off with calibration profiles, go to market immediately, return with the first sets of assessed candidates, and iterate based on client feedback, creating a continuous improvement loop. New profiles surface throughout. The process is finished when the client has two or three solid candidates in final stage, not when an arbitrary milestone is hit.

What is something that a foreign company would never guess about the American labour market?

How regional it is. Foreign companies often think of the US as a single market with one set of senior talent dynamics. In practice, the senior talent market in Atlanta is fundamentally different from San Francisco, which is different from New York, which is different from Houston, Boston, or the Research Triangle. Different sectors cluster differently. Compensation benchmarks vary significantly. Cultural expectations of leadership vary. And the question of where to base a senior leader - which city, which time zone, which talent pool - is often as consequential as who the leader is.

What this means in practice is that the best candidate for a senior US role is rarely in the city the foreign company expected. Cleantech leadership talent clusters in Houston and Atlanta, not New York. Industrial transformation expertise sits in the Midwest. Healthtech leadership is increasingly in Nashville and Boston. The mapping between sector and geography in the US is non-obvious, and the firms that get it right are the ones who know where to look.

Why did you decide to join the Talentor network?

Because Talentor offered the right combination for L'AGENCE in our industry: true global reach without compromising the boutique commitment our clients hire us for. Talentor is a network of independent, partner-led firms, each with deep local market expertise, collaborating across borders without the bureaucracy of a global parent. That model maps exactly to how L'AGENCE operates, and to what I believe scaling companies actually need from their senior search partner.

There is also a deeper reason. We built L'AGENCE as an AI-native firm, and that operating model has unlocked our reach into global talent markets in ways traditional search firms simply do not have access to. But executive search is, at its core, a relationship-driven and people-driven industry. AI gives you one part of the equation. The other is physical presence, on-the-ground insight, and partners who know the local market the way only someone living it can. Talentor brings that, and brings it at scale.

For our clients, this means we can hold a senior search in Atlanta and bring true on-the-ground expertise in Toronto, Paris, Abidjan, or Singapore on the same engagement - 540+ consultants across 40+ countries on five continents, ranked among Hunt Scanlon's Global 40 for six consecutive years. That is the firm L'AGENCE was always designed to be.

What do you think is great about being part of an international network / the Talentor network?

What is great about being in the Talentor network is what it means for our clients. Cross-border senior search done well requires more than a name in another country, it requires partners who actually know each other, trust each other, and share a standard of work. Talentor builds that standard deliberately.

I came to understand that firsthand at the Talentor Global Partner Meeting in Toronto, after about a year of engagement with the network's leadership, Gertraud Eregger, Sabine Steiner, and Michael Sarsteiner. They invited me as a guest of the network so I could experience it firsthand. The conversations with fellow partners were candid and substantive. The Talentor team and the partners themselves all know each partner firm with remarkable depth, its distinctive capabilities, the history of how it joined, the people who lead it. That kind of institutional memory is rare in international networks. I was given the opportunity to present L'AGENCE to the entire group, my first formal presentation in several years, and what came back was generous: substantive questions, candid feedback, and offers of collaboration. By the end of the meeting, I felt welcomed as a peer who was already known.

That is what global reach is supposed to feel like, and what our clients will experience working through the network.