You're Champion for One Night. Then You Have to Requalify.
The Paris Executive Search Consultant whose entire evaluation method rests on one question, does this person still want to re-earn success, and who has had to answer it about himself twice.
TLDR
Antoine founded Labastie Executive Search in 2013 after leaving a bigger French firm over a culture clash with volume-driven partners from Michael Page and PagePersonnel.
His central thesis on evaluating executives: past success proves nothing about future motivation. The hardest trait to assess in a leader is whether they’re still willing to re-earn it.
By his own account, the firm outgrew every projection he’d made for it within five years, and five people who trained under him have since gone on to become Heads of Recruitment at much larger companies.
Two energy crashes, one at year five that he now describes as close to depression, and one at year ten, reshaped how he runs the firm. The second led the whole team, not just him, to build a société à mission with four measurable commitments in 2024.
He has been stuck at six people for around three years and believes the next hire has to be an experienced advisor who opens new doors, not another junior consultant he trains and eventually loses to bigger firms.
He picked his children up from school two days a week rather than chase becoming France’s biggest search firm, and says the trade-off cost him nothing.
On the night France won the 1998 World Cup, Antoine Labastie was a teenager watching Zinedine Zidane become a national hero. He still reaches for that match to explain the hardest thing to judge in an executive, and, it turns out, the hardest thing he’s had to judge in himself.
"You’re world champion for one night," he says. "The next match, you could lose four nil to a team nobody’s heard of. Being champion is an instant. It doesn’t last. The moment you step off the podium, you’re not champion any more. You have to requalify."
It’s the test he runs on every senior candidate he presents. It’s also, as it turns out, the test he’s had to pass on himself more than once.
Built the Long Way Round
Antoine trained at emlyon business school, then spent years deliberately building a finance background before he’d let himself go independent. He worked as an auditor at EY, then spent six months in Vancouver at a ten-person travel-assistance company where the founder was in the office every day, then a year in Spain at an industrial rubber-components manufacturer being run by the four sons who’d inherited it from their father, who still dropped by from time to time. He wanted to understand how a business actually worked before he risked running his own. Both experiences left a mark less about leadership than about succession: watching one generation hand a business to the next.
Back in France, he joined a recruitment firm called Jobberry as a junior consultant and found the job he’d keep. He was promoted to head of the firm’s finance recruitment practice. But the firm’s four partners were down to three and increasingly split, and two of them had come up through Michael Page and PagePersonnel, with a volume-driven, contingency-based culture that didn’t match the retainer-based, quality-first practice Antoine had built.
"If I’d become a partner there, I’d always have been their old junior," he says. "There was going to be an imbalance. It was better to leave alone."
He founded Labastie Headhunting, since renamed Labastie Executive Search, in 2013, working solo out of a small office in Paris, betting that a smaller, sharper firm would outperform a bigger one running on headcount.
Hire Two, Not One
The first year nearly broke him anyway. Growth came fast: 50% ahead of plan in his first full year, then more of the same. He kept saying yes to every client, driven less by ambition than by fear: if he turned work down, he reasoned, the client would simply call someone else, possibly someone better, and he’d lose the account for good.
A friend’s wedding in Colombia forced the issue. He’d been working without pause, and his friends told him plainly that he was heading for burnout and that his wife would leave him if he didn’t change something. He decided to hire, and hired two people rather than one.
"You can’t be alone with just one person," he says. "That person needs a third one to talk to when the boss isn’t around, to say ‘he’s being a pain today’ without it going back to me. That’s when people actually unload."
The Re-Earning Test
Antoine’s method for reading senior candidates rejects the industry’s default: build a case from the CV, then project it forward. He argues that approach misses the one variable that actually predicts performance.
"Success happens in a specific context, with a specific source of motivation," he says. "Some people get success and just want to enjoy it. They won’t do it again. Others loved it and want to feel that again, so they’re ready to put in the work. Almost no success comes without a lot of work. You have to work out which one you’re looking at."
The second filter is cultural, not psychological: whether the candidate’s values match the company they’re about to join. "If you’re against the culture you’re walking into, you’ll last six months, maybe a year. It will never work, however good you are on paper."
He runs interviews loosely by design, letting candidates structure their own opening pitch rather than directing from the first question, because how someone chooses to present themselves is data in itself. Take a Chief Financial Officer candidate who talks only about controlling and payroll, never the business itself. That tells him something before he’s asked a single follow-up. "If it’s not important enough to bring up unprompted, they don’t see themselves as part of the strategy. For an executive committee seat, that’s close to disqualifying. When you recruit someone for that seat, you should always ask yourself: could this person become Chief Executive one day? If the answer’s no, that’s a bad sign."
Getting His Hands Dirty
The same logic about re-earning success shows up in how Antoine leads day to day. When a team member below him starts to feel that a manager just says "get on with it" without ever showing up to help, he argues, exemplarity becomes the whole job.
He describes stepping in personally when a mission at his own firm was going badly: sitting down with the junior colleague running it, working through what was actually in scope, and splitting the work between them rather than taking over. "I wanted two fresh sets of eyes on whether the method was broken, or whether they just needed help."
He extends the same principle to bigger organisations: when finance is struggling, the Chief Executive should go into finance personally, not wait two quarters and pull the trigger from a distance.
Proof of the Method
Antoine applies his own test to his own hiring. Five people have trained under him at Labastie Executive Search and left, after two to five years each, to become Heads of Recruitment at considerably larger companies. He counts that as his clearest evidence the method works, not retention, but what people become after they leave.
"I’m proud of that," he says. "They arrived at one level and left at a level above it."
The firm’s own growth backs up the same instinct. In its first five years, results ran so far ahead of what he’d projected when he started, doubling some years, that it briefly convinced him nothing could touch him.
Two Crashes
That confidence didn’t last. The first crash hit five years in, in 2018. "It stopped working," he says, "because I wasn’t putting in the right energy any more." For six to nine months he struggled to find any motivation, and he now describes it as possibly a mild depression. He credits his former boss from Jobberry, by then working as a coach, with pulling him out of it, largely because she knew him well enough to see what was happening.
The second crash, at year ten, he handled differently. Rather than spiral into the same solo questioning, he took it to the team: they’d already beaten his own expectations, so how should the firm think about the next ten years? That conversation is what turned into the firm’s société à mission status, a French legal status, similar in spirit to a B Corp, that writes social commitments directly into the company’s bylaws.
It’s the same test, applied to himself. Two crashes, and twice he had to decide whether he still wanted to do the work required to keep going.
Four Commitments, Two of Them Not His
Labastie Executive Search became a société à mission in 2024, setting four measurable objectives: 30 hours of training per collaborator per year, mandatory mentorship where every collaborator supports at least one other person, a commitment to include at least one candidate currently distanced from employment on every shortlist, and 1% of revenue donated to sports associations.
Antoine is candid that the idea started as scepticism. Comparing notes with a friend who runs his own company, Kolsquare, he initially dismissed the société à mission model as "a bit of a stunt," surprised that even a firm the size of KPMG had adopted it. His friend pushed back, and Antoine realised he’d formed an opinion without doing any homework. He also frames it as a positioning decision as much as an ethical one, in a market where most boutique search firms compete purely on network.
Two of the four commitments, he points out, aren’t really about him. "It’s not just me doing this. Everyone has to be on board." The other two, the training hours and the sports sponsorship, are the ones he pushed for personally.
Colleagues, Not a Team
Antoine never refers to the people who work with him as "his team." He calls them colleagues, and gives his most experienced people real autonomy over sourcing and client relationships. With more junior colleagues, he stays closely involved, and admits the two postures sit uneasily together.
"My dream is that people who work with me could work anywhere, and choose to be here because they’re happy," he says. "I try to push them towards more autonomy. Honestly, I only manage it moderately well."
He is wary of his own default setting under pressure. "When things go sideways, my instinct is: I decide, and that’s it. But if my colleagues know that’s always the fallback, it infantilises them. Why try hard if I’m just going to take over?" He’d rather they work for their own satisfaction, the way he says he worked for himself at Jobberry, motivated by a client’s thanks rather than a boss’s approval.
The Ceiling
Labastie Executive Search has been six people, Antoine plus five colleagues, for around three years. What he doesn’t think will get the firm past six, he says, is training more people like the ones who’ve already left and thrived elsewhere.
"I think I’m an artisan in my head, and that’s what’s capping the company’s growth," he says.
His plan is to bring in someone considerably older than himself, possibly already retired, a former partner from a search or consulting firm who can open doors into networks he doesn’t have. Whether he’s capable of handing over the parts of the job he currently insists on doing himself, chiefly meeting every candidate on every mission where the client would call him personally if something went wrong, he says he genuinely doesn’t know.
What He Wants Said of Him
Asked how he wants to be remembered, Antoine doesn’t reach for a grand answer. He wants clients and candidates to say that when you hand him a problem, he tries to solve it, and if he can’t, it’s because the brief itself was close to impossible, not because he didn’t look hard enough.
He is less sure he wants to be called an inspiring leader. "I’d like that too, but I’m not sure it’s true."
He is more certain about the rest. His wife is a Partner at EY, managing a team of around 240 to 250 people, a larger headcount than his own firm by a long way. Both could easily have let work take over their lives. Antoine says it never felt like a sacrifice to avoid that: he picked his children up from school two days a week when they were young, took them to sport, did homework with them, and says it motivated him "ten times more than more money" ever did. He is blunt about founders he’s watched build bigger firms than his while their children struggled at school or their marriages ended.
"I’d rather be with them day to day, because I actually know my kids. Not for all the money in the world."
He adds a caveat, the kind that suggests he means it rather than performing it. "Touch wood. Things can go wrong fast, professionally or personally. There are things I know I should have got my hands dirty on earlier. It gets harder to go back to that once you’ve had some success. But that’s the key."
What he’d want said of him, in the end, isn’t just about the work.
"I’d like people to say I was diverse: a good father, a good husband, a good boss, and a fun guy too."
Antoine doesn’t reach for the word "leader." He reaches for "artisan": someone who, handed an impossible brief, exhausts every option before admitting it couldn’t be done. It’s the same standard he applies to every candidate he evaluates, and by his own account, the only one he’s ever fully trusted himself to meet, on the pitch, in the business, and at home.
What’s next
Antoine is currently defining what a senior advisor hire would look like, the first outside appointment he’s considered making above his own level.
Antoine Labastie is Founder of Labastie Executive Search, a Paris-based executive search firm specialising in senior leadership and C-level recruitment, listed on Talent Business Partners. He was interviewed by Francine Nyamba, Chief of Staff at Talent Business Partners.