ELiN
Partners
People · 01

Built by leaders.
Designed for impact.

Each of our partners has sat in the seats we now help fill, as CEO, as CHRO, on boards, leading businesses through growth, transformation and succession. We come together under one name because the best executive work today rarely fits inside one head.

The founders · 02

Meet the partners.

Ineke Kooistra, Founder
Founder · Amsterdam

Ineke Kooistra

The CEO perspective

Ineke is a master at turning big ideas into reality.

For ten years she led YoungCapital as CEO, taking the company from €60 million to €600 million in revenue, scaling the internal team from 190 to 1,400 people, with 26,000 temporary workers placed alongside. She then became CEO of Switzerland-based Circle8Group, leading one of Europe's fastest-growing IT staffing firms toward €1.3 billion in revenue.

She knows what it is to build a leadership team from the ground up. She knows what it is to scale through difficult years and easy ones. She knows what it is to hand over leadership well, and what happens when it goes wrong.

Today she also works as an interim CEO and strategic advisor, stepping into leadership teams that need a steady operator now, and helping CEOs and boards through the moments where their business outgrows the leadership team that built it.

These days, Ineke works where leadership, AI and growth meet. She advises CEOs and boards through the moments where their business outgrows the leadership team that built it. She writes a column for MT/Sprout, speaks regularly via Businesswise and on stage, and is known for her Seasonal CEO essays, the framework that sits at the heart of ELiN's thinking. She also hosts Bright Leadership Reflections, her interview series with the leaders she most admires.

What she brings to ELiN: the CEO perspective, a creative and innovative mind, and a habit of finding the option no one else has thought of yet.

Ineke Insights Seasonal CEO · Leadership · Bright Reflections →
Elbrich Batstra, Founder
Founder · Amsterdam

Elbrich Batstra

The CHRO perspective

Elbrich is a senior HR executive who has spent her career inside the room where the hardest people-decisions get made.

She fuelled the international growth at Monster.com, led the hyper-growth phase at YoungCapital as CHRO, and shaped the culture at The Works. Her expertise spans culture, organisational design, high-performance teams, HR-tech innovation and executive coaching.

She is a master at empowering leaders and teams to perform at their highest level, and at building workplaces where everyone feels they belong. Because when people thrive, businesses thrive too.

Her writing voice is unmistakable. In her Love Letter to the CEO series, Elbrich writes open letters from the CHRO chair to the founders, CEOs and final decision-makers she has worked alongside: personal, direct, sometimes uncomfortable, always written from inside the room where the hard decisions happen.

What she brings to ELiN: the CHRO perspective. When a CEO is struggling with their team, Elbrich has been the person three feet away from that struggle, responsible for solving it.

Elbrich Insights Love Letters to the CEO · Culture · Teams →
Why we exist · 03

The traditional executive search firm grew out of recruitment. ELiN grew out of operating.

We started working together because the executive work clients increasingly asked us for had begun to look more like architecture than recruitment. Founders no longer asked "find me a CFO." They asked: "help me think through who I need around me for the next phase, and then help me bring them in."

That work is what we do.

Where we work · 04

Where the work takes us.

Ineke and Elbrich work from various locations. Amsterdam and Zürich are the home bases, the rest follows the work.

Amsterdam canal at golden hour
Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Our home base. The Zuidas, the canals, the coffee. Where most conversations begin.

Lake Zürich at sunset
Zürich
Switzerland

Our DACH connection. A senior network across Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

St James's Park, London, autumn
London & wherever
Where the work takes us

Ineke and Elbrich work from various locations. The work itself decides where we land next.

The team behind the partners · 02a

We are the first point of contact.
We are not the whole team.

Ineke and Elbrich are the people you meet first, and the people who hold accountability for every engagement. But behind each of us stands a dedicated team of researchers, consultants and operational support, based both at our Amsterdam offices and at our Zurich location.

This is how senior search actually works: not one person doing everything, but one senior partner who knows everything that is happening on your search, supported by a team built for the depth of the work.

You always know who to call. And there is always someone behind that person.

What we believe · 05

What we believe about leadership.

Leadership is not a title. It is the ability to create impact in a specific context.

We have seen brilliant leaders fail in the wrong context, and unremarkable CVs deliver extraordinary results in the right one. Our work is to read the context first, the leader second, and the fit between them most carefully of all.

Most leadership failures are diagnostic failures.

A founder who hires a "professional CEO" when what they actually needed was a strong COO. A board that replaces a CFO when the real problem lives in the operating model. We do diagnosis before we do search, every time.

Seasons change.

What a company needs in its leadership at €15 million is rarely what it needs at €80 million, or at €200 million. The CEO who built the company is sometimes the CEO who scales it, and sometimes not. We help boards and founders see those moments early, and respond well.