About Tan Aik Seng
A practitioner who studies the consequences of practice.
Executive headhunter. Management adviser and corporate trainer. PhD phenomenological researcher. Author.
I have spent my career inside decisions that change organisations and lives.
Executive search taught me that an appointment is never merely a transaction between a vacancy and a résumé. It is a negotiated future. The organisation is buying judgement, trust and possibility. The candidate is accepting a social world they cannot fully see. The recruiter stands between them, translating realities that are often incomplete, politically edited or emotionally charged.
For almost four decades, I have worked across leadership, managerial, engineering and professional appointments. That experience gave me a practical education in ambition, misalignment, persuasion, disappointment and recovery.
Why phenomenology
The official process rarely explains the lived failure.
Organisations often know the timeline of a failed hire but not its meaning. They know when the offer was signed, when the employee joined and when the resignation arrived. They may not know when trust first fractured, which promise became unbelievable, or how “empowerment” became experienced as abandonment.
My PhD thesis - A Phenomenological Study of Hiring and Onboarding Failures Across Multiple Stakeholder Perspectives: Hiring Managers, Recruiters, and Job Seekers - examines those failures from inside the experience of all three parties.
Phenomenology matters because people do not respond to a policy in the abstract. They respond to what the policy becomes in lived time: the unanswered message, the contradictory instruction, the missing sponsor, the interview promise that disappears on Day 1.
The concepts I bring into practice
Person-Organisation Fit
Not cultural sameness, but a credible relationship between values, demands, capabilities, identity and the actual operating environment.
Social Exchange Theory
Trust develops through reciprocal signals. When the organisation withdraws support while increasing expectations, the relationship becomes morally and psychologically unstable.
Enjoyment-Performance Theory
Sustainable contribution depends not only on competence but on whether the work activates natural preference, energy and meaningful engagement.
My category of one
I am not an academic who occasionally comments on hiring, nor a recruiter who borrows academic language to decorate a sales pitch. I am a scholar-practitioner whose research question emerged from decades of direct exposure to appointment risk.
I move between the interview room, the boardroom, the training room and the research interview. I use the double hermeneutic of phenomenology to understand how people interpret their experience - and the discipline of executive search to convert that understanding into accountable decisions.
The result is commercially sharp work with a deeper human diagnosis.
A working philosophy
Truth before persuasion. Accountability before blame. Integration before performance theatre.
Say what the role really is
Mandates become credible when authority, politics, constraints and predecessor history are discussable.
Assess the relationship, not only the individual
A capable executive can still fail inside a contradictory system. Fit must be tested in both directions.
Design Day 1 before the offer
Integration begins when expectations, sponsorship and access are negotiated - not when orientation slides are presented.
Work with me