Solutions · Executive search
For executive search, AIcruiters works like a thorough research team. It maps the market for a senior mandate, builds a longlist with evidence for every name and prepares personal outreach. Because senior markets are small and mandates confidential, a consultant approves who is approached and what is said. Relationships and judgement stay with your partners.
Three things: the market is small, the mandate is confidential, and every approach is remembered. For a CFO role at a mid-sized industrial company there may be a few dozen realistic candidates in the country. Approach them clumsily and you have not just lost a candidate, you have damaged your firm's name in the one market you work in.
Executive search therefore runs on research rather than volume. Before a partner makes a call, a researcher maps the relevant companies, identifies who holds or recently held comparable roles, checks career paths and builds a longlist the client can discuss. That work is thorough, slow and hard to scale when several mandates start in the same month.
AIcruiters takes over the research layer, not the relationship. The approach stays personal because a person decides on it.
An example: a retained mandate for a managing director of a technical services company.
Step 01 · Brief
Requirements and preferences are separated: P&L responsibility is a must, sector experience is preferred, specific companies are excluded. The consultant validates the brief before any search runs.
Step 02 · Market map
Relevant companies, titles and adjacent career paths are searched along several routes, including people who hold the role today and those one step below it.
Step 03 · Longlist
Each candidate is ranked against the brief with matching experience, missing requirements and risk factors, so the longlist discussion with the client is about substance.
Step 04 · Approach
Outreach is drafted from each profile and waits for approval. When the partner prefers to call someone personally, the consultant simply does not approve the message for that name.
By making every outward action an explicit decision. For executive search we recommend requiring approval for the search strategy, the selection and each message. Data access and retention are limited to the workflow of that mandate, and uncertain cases go to a consultant rather than running automatically.
At the start of a mandate, when the market map and longlist decide how fast you can present, and in firms where researchers are the bottleneck across several searches. It is also useful for the level just below the board: directors and heads of department where the market is wider but the approach must still be personal.
It helps less where the candidate group is a handful of people the partner already knows by name. There the value is in the relationship, not the search. The candidate ranking still helps you document why others were considered and not approached.
Sectors where senior talent is scarce and profiles are well documented tend to fit well, such as finance and engineering.
Search firms must not approach people at current clients. Companies to exclude can be noted in the brief as a hard requirement, and with approval on selection a consultant checks every name before contact. How your off-limits list is handled is agreed during implementation.
Only if it sends messages nobody checked. In executive search we recommend approval on every message, so nothing goes to a senior candidate without a consultant reading it first. Whether a mandate can run without any outreach at all is agreed per implementation.
It takes over much of the repetitive research: mapping, searching, screening and documenting. Researchers then spend more time on validation, referencing and candidate conversations. How that affects your team is part of the business case.
Many search firms use LinkedIn Recruiter, and it works well for looking up specific people. A retained search needs more than lookups: a documented market map and a longlist the client can challenge. The question is who builds that. See AIcruiters vs LinkedIn Recruiter.
Search firms keep mandate history, client conflicts and candidate notes in their CRM, so that stays the system of record. How the longlist and interested candidates get there, through a direct integration, a structured handover or another setup, is assessed per system.
Your consultants. AIcruiters provides the evidence; judgement on fit, motivation and presentation stays with the firm.
Bring a mandate, anonymised if you prefer. We build the market map and longlist with you and show where approval sits. The business case follows from your own numbers.
