Daniel Müller

A Consulting Plan That Became a Search Career

The original plan had nothing to do with recruitment. Studying business administration in Germany and abroad, Müller was drawn to consulting for the reason most ambitious graduates are: the steep learning curve, the constant rotation of clients, industries and problems. He got exactly that, first in strategy consulting, then in a form he had not anticipated.

Executive search turned out to offer the same variety with higher stakes. Fourteen years in, he describes the ride honestly as interesting and bumpy, full of learnings, different managers, different roles and widening responsibilities. What he does not describe is stagnation. Staying at one firm for well over a decade, he points out, is rarer than staying in one industry, and the industry itself keeps accelerating. He considers himself in the middle of his career, with, as he puts it, way more to come.

Three People Who Shaped Him

Ask Müller who built him and he does not hedge. Three names come immediately.

The first is Thomas, the manager who hired him in 2012 and taught him the craft itself, how to actually do search and recruitment. He gave Müller the chance and the onboarding that turned a strategy consultant into a search professional.

The second is Richard Moore, today the firm's CEO, whom Müller encountered at different touchpoints across the years and still describes as "super inspirational." Moore's background sits on the leadership advisory side rather than pure search, and that perspective permanently expanded Müller's sense of the job. It prompted the question he has kept asking ever since: what else is there beyond straight recruitment and search? Moore also modelled something less comfortable, a habit of challenging the status quo and pushing people toward the next level.

The third is Mikkel, a Danish former manager who led as a coach. His contribution was reflective rather than technical: broadening the scope, broadening the space, and pressing Müller to think hard about where he was, who he was and what came next. Beyond those three, Müller credits many other managers, colleagues and, importantly, clients, who shape how a consultant thinks about the work. And he credits his own mistakes. Failures teach a great deal, he notes, but only if you self reflect and look back at your own work honestly.

Finding Talent Versus Selecting Talent

Müller has a clean framework for the AI question that most of the industry is still arguing about, and it turns on a distinction he draws constantly in his own work: finding the right talent is not the same activity as selecting the right talent.

On the finding side, he is unreserved. AI is a huge accelerator that makes search dramatically faster and more efficient. In his day to day work, which centres on client development and acting as a partner to clients, it has become a genuine booster across outreach, communication, presentation, LinkedIn content, marketing, sales and business development. The administrative weight of the job is exactly where the technology earns its keep.

On the selection side, Müller holds a firm line. When a process narrows to two or three finalists, Mercuri Urval does not use AI to choose. At that point the decision has almost nothing to do with track record or what appears on a resume. It is about culture fit, personality, cognitive abilities and, above all, contextualization: putting the right leader into the right situation. That requires knowing the client at a level that only comes from sitting with board members and C-level peers and grasping the full context around a role. "Human in the loop," as he puts it. He regards that discipline as a genuine differentiator from competitors, not a nostalgic preference.

The Ikigai Standard

Asked what he would tell someone entering the profession today, Müller answers in six words. "Know your ikigai and go for it."

The Japanese concept, he explains, is broader and more demanding than the Western habit of asking about purpose. It has four dimensions and reaches past work into who you are, what your strengths are and what the world actually needs. It is harder to answer than a career plan, which is precisely why he recommends it to the young men and women coming into search. In a business built on placing other people into the right context, it is a fitting piece of advice: start by knowing your own.