Identifying the parameters of nonlinear state-space models from input-output data typically requires solving a highly non-convex optimization problem, which is prone to slow convergence and suboptimal local solutions. This work improves the reliability and efficiency of the estimation process by decomposing the overall optimization problem into a sequence of tractable subproblems. Starting from a linear baseline model, nonlinear residual dynamics are first estimated using a guided residual search (GRS) and subsequently refined through multiple-shooting optimization. Experiments on two benchmarks show competitive performance with state-of-the-art black-box methods and improved convergence over naive initialization.