Anita leads end-to-end executive searches across technology, construction, and real estate. She translates strategy into leadership requirements, maps candidates to mission and culture, aligns stakeholders quickly, and builds the first 90 days around Cause, Connection, and Compensation so the new leader arrives with credibility—and stays.

How she works (and why it’s different)

• Inside-Out first. Start with outcomes, constraints, and team dynamics—then touch the market.
• EI discipline. Understand how leaders perform under pressure, influence peers, and build durable followership.
• Decision cadence. Name trade-offs, close loops, keep choices moving to yes/no.
• Integration by design. Day-zero to day-90 plan that the leader and team actually follow.
• FR/EN fluency. Wider reach, faster cycles, fewer translation errors—literal and cultural.

Selected Outcomes

Anita’s work in executive search and leadership assessment is designed to reduce hiring risk before the offer and improve alignment after the hire.

Leadership Fit

Anita helps clients move beyond credentials and assess whether a finalist has the judgment, motivation, Emotional Intelligence and operating style required to succeed inside the organization.

Executive Assessment

Using Perry-Martel’s Inside-Out Approach®, she helps evaluate candidates against the actual business mission, leadership requirements and organizational environment — not simply against a job description.

Offer and Negotiation Support

Anita has worked with clients and candidates through complex executive negotiations, helping clarify expectations, resolve concerns and support successful offer acceptance.

Executive Integration

Her role continues after selection. Anita helps clients and newly hired executives establish clearer expectations, priorities and working relationships during the critical transition into the role.

Long-Term Search Outcomes

This work contributes to Perry-Martel’s broader record of more than 1,600 executive and senior leadership placements and only five replacement searches under the firm’s guarantee since 1988.

Selected Search Examples

• AECOM — mission clarity to decisive hire. Reframed the brief with stakeholder mapping and background psychology; converged on the real success profile that closed a high-visibility search.
• Clever — precision fit in a crowded market. Surfaced unspoken leadership dynamics; repositioned the mandate; secured the operator the business actually needed.
• Tulip — from skepticism to consensus. Exposed misalignments with a no-nonsense facilitation style and EI lens; rebuilt trust; closed a marquee hire.

The human engine

Anita Martel and David Perry met at the Basic Officer’s Qualification (BOQ) Course in 1980. They were fierce competitors in camp—both gunning for the Sword of Honour. Anita finished second; David won the Sword, then spent the next several weeks convincing her to go on a first date. That friendly rivalry became a partnership superpower at PMI.

Case in Point: Anita negotiated Perry-Martel’s largest executive compensation package to date, valued at approximately $10 million including salary, incentives, equity and other negotiated compensation elements.

They married six years after that first boot camp. Two years later, Anita invested her inheritance into building the firm they believed in. She raised four children while growing PMI and authoring books, proving that execution and empathy aren’t opposites—they’re complements.

When David suffered a stroke in 2008, Anita flipped the script. She expanded Perry-Martel, co-created Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters, launched the Guerrilla Job Search Boot Camp, and helped build MyNewJobHunt.com and WorkInsight.io to help people get back to work faster. That period hard-wired her playbook: start with the truth, move with purpose, make the outcome unavoidable.

Speaking & teaching

Anita frequently speaks on stage with David around the world on executive hiring, integration, high-performance teams, and modern job search. Audiences value the dual perspective—the strategist and the operator in dialogue—with zero fluff and immediately usable tools.

What clients can expect

• A brutally clear mandate within days, not weeks
• Behavioral evidence over bravado, EI over guesswork
• Stakeholders aligned and ready to decide
• A leader who arrives aligned—and a team ready to receive them

If your next executive hire can’t be a coin toss, book a confidential strategy call with Perry-Martel International.