Talent has always been about more than hiring.
I'm Matt Goddard – a Talent leader, executive recruiter and leadership coach with 15+ years' experience helping companies find, hire and develop the people who shape what happens next.
My career has moved between agency search, in-house Talent, executive search, embedded consulting and Talent leadership – from global technology businesses to early-stage startups.
That combination is what sits behind Goddard Talent.
Different roles. One consistent question.
What changed because of who we hired?
That's the question that has increasingly shaped how I think about Talent.
Not simply how quickly a role was filled or whether an offer was accepted, but whether we found someone who raised the level, changed what the company was capable of and ultimately succeeded in the environment they joined.
It's why my work now connects Talent leadership, Executive Search and leadership integration.
Built from inside the work.
I've worked across almost every side of Talent – agency recruitment, internal recruiting, executive search, embedded Talent consulting and Talent leadership.
My experience has included scaling teams, building Talent foundations, leading recruiters, partnering with founders and executives, and personally delivering critical hiring across technology businesses at very different stages of growth.
Companies Matt has worked with or partnered alongside through search, embedded consulting and Talent leadership.
Closest to the work when it matters most.
Much of my recent work has been with VC-backed startups and scaleups – often at the point where hiring is accelerating but the Talent function is still being built around it.
That means moving constantly between the strategic and the practical.
One conversation might be about the hiring plan, operating model or leadership team.
The next might be calibrating an engineering search, interviewing a candidate or fixing a process that isn't working.
I like that proximity to the work.
It's also why Goddard Talent is built around strategy and execution, together.
From founding teams to executive leadership.
My work has increasingly focused on the people building and leading technology companies.
I've hired across Engineering, Product, AI and Machine Learning, alongside executive and functional leadership roles.
That breadth matters.
The strongest hiring decisions rarely happen in isolation. They come from understanding the company, how the different functions connect and what a particular person needs to make possible at that stage of growth.
Hiring the person is only part of the story.
My work as a leadership coach changed how I think about recruiting.
Search gives you a window into someone's experience, capability and potential.
Coaching goes somewhere different – into how people think, respond, lead and navigate change once they're actually inside the role.
Bringing those perspectives together led to a simple belief:
Making the hire is the beginning.
It's also what led to the development of Goddard Talent Leadership Integration.
Intuition belongs in leadership too.
My coaching is grounded in Intuitive Psychology® – an approach that creates space to look beyond goals and performance into the patterns, assumptions and internal dynamics shaping how someone shows up.
That doesn't replace commercial judgement, evidence or experience.
It adds another layer to them.
It's this approach that informs the coaching within Goddard Talent Leadership Integration.
Why Goddard Talent?
I built Goddard Talent around the kind of Talent work I believe scaling companies increasingly need.
Senior expertise without unnecessary hierarchy.
Flexibility without sacrificing ownership.
Strategy without distance from execution.
Executive Search that becomes part of the business rather than sitting outside it.
And a belief that successful hiring should ultimately be measured by what happens after someone joins.
That's the business I'm building.
Building something ambitious?
If you're thinking about how to build the Talent capability around your next stage of growth, I'd love to hear what you're working on.