A search firm built around the part of the process everyone else rushes.
Animate Europe is the European business of Animate Search, founded in 2015. We place commercial leadership across Europe from Barcelona, partner led, in three sectors, with a diagnostic that starts before the first approach.
Most searches are lost before they start.
A search usually begins with a job description one person wrote and five people quietly disagree about. Nobody tests whether the profile exists at the price agreed, and nobody asks the market before asking for a shortlist.
We built Animate to test that before the search opens, and to bring more evidence to every stage that follows.
Neither layer works alone.
Animate Atlas, the platform we built for this work, gives our partners more to judge. The partners decide what any of it is worth. Remove either one and the search suffers.
Four commitments that do not move.
Partner led, start to finish
The partner who takes the brief runs the search and sits in the offer conversation. Research supports the work across markets, but the judgement never gets delegated.
What that rules out: a pitch team you never see again, a junior consultant learning your market at your expense, and a shortlist assembled by someone who was not in the briefing.
Commercial leadership only
Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Presales, RevOps and Partnerships. Commercial leadership only, in three sectors.
What that rules out: a search where your mandate is one of forty, run from a database built for every function except yours.
Intelligence with judgement
Atlas, our own platform, reads the whole market so the partner can act on it. The machine does the gathering, the judgment stays human.
What that rules out: a shortlist a machine scored, and a recommendation nobody in the room can explain.
Straight answers
To clients when a role needs reshaping before it goes to market. To candidates when a move is wrong for them. Both cost us work in the short term and earn it back.
What that rules out: a brief taken to market because the fee was signed, and a candidate kept warm for a role that is already dead.
Darren Timmins
Darren has run senior commercial searches across Europe for over twenty years: Chief Revenue Officers, VPs of Sales and Marketing, and country leadership, for listed groups and enterprise software businesses through to first commercial hires at funded scale-ups. Before co-founding Animate he led the technology and consulting practices of two European search firms. He has also been on the other side of the table: he co-founded an AI-driven HRTech business and built its commercial team, and is a co-founder of an HRTech incubator, advising its portfolio companies as they do the same.
Atlas, the intelligence platform behind every Animate search, was built by Darren and his team rather than bought in, and is shaped around how a search actually runs.
Connect on LinkedInCompanies we have worked with.
Commercial mandates run over twenty years. They are grouped by the market each company sits in rather than by the three sectors we sell into. Industrial and Automation is the newest of those sectors, and we are building it deliberately rather than opportunistically.
Close enough to the market to know it, far enough to see all of it.
Our clients hire in one country and then in three. Working across Europe from a single base means the same view of the market applies to every one of them, rather than a different office having a different opinion.
Where a mandate needs local research or language coverage, we bring in people who have it.
Start a search.
A reply within two working days, whether or not this is a search we should take.