for executive search firms

Executive candidate research, without the week of work.¹

Tell Cerna the executive role and what you need. Cerna finds the executives who match, vets each one against your spec, and returns a shortlist with the evidence behind every name.²

First search on us. $1,000 per search after that.³

the transformation

Brief in. Shortlist out.

A brief becomes a rubric. The rubric becomes a wide discovery pass, staged filtering, deep enrichment, per-criterion qualification, adversarial QA — and a shortlist. Two sections. Every claim sourced.

what you submit
brief.txt
role
SVP Operations · medical devices · US Southeast
must-have criteria
— multi-site manufacturing ops
— medical devices (Class II or above)
— P&L responsibility $50M+
— has led an FDA remediation
disqualifiers
Big 4 consulting background · <3 yrs in current role
what you get back
shortlist · qa-cleared
Section A · on-spec matches
Maria Alvarez SVP Operations · Precision Medtech
¹ ² ³ ⁴
Devon Kaur VP Ops & Supply Chain · Halcyon Bio
⁵ ⁶ ⁷
Rohit Menon Head of Ops · MedTrace Systems
⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰
Section B · strong laterals
Elena Prokop SVP Ops · aerospace (adjacent regulated mfg)
¹¹ ¹²
Jae Park GM Manufacturing · was VP Ops at Medtronic
¹³ ¹⁴
anatomy

What each entry carries.

Not a resume dump. Every field is here because a recruiter needs it in front of a client. Everything sourced, everything checkable.

executive entry

Devon Kaur

VP Ops & Supply Chain · Halcyon Bio (Class II devices)

linkedin.com/in/devon-kaur · Halcyon press 2024-11-14
must-haves
multi-site ops Class II devices P&L $80M US SE (Atlanta)
tenure 3y 4mo current · 7y prior at Boston Sci
depth MedTech Ops Summit keynote 2024 · led $40M automation program
contact d.kaur@[verified] · +1 (••) •••-••55
  • Role & company. Current title, confirmed via a named source you can open.
  • Per-criterion rubric. Every must-have from your brief, rendered as a pill: confirmed, unconfirmed, or flagged with the specific reason.
  • Tenure. Confirmed dates for the current role and the last relevant prior role. Not a full CV — just what the recruiter needs.
  • Depth signals. Publications, conference talks, board seats, regulatory exposure, patents. Where relevant to the role, cited.
  • Contact. Verified personal email, LinkedIn, mobile where available. Data for the recruiter's outreach — Cerna does not contact executives directly.
  • Section B reasoning. For laterals: which criterion is missed, which are satisfied, why it's worth a look.
sourcing

Every claim carries its source.

Most AI recruiting tools return a list of names. Cerna returns a document you can challenge, because every confirmed claim traces to something specific and locatable — not "public sources," not "company website."

most ai recruiting tools

"Led global operations at Precision Medtech, including multi-site manufacturing and supply chain."

no citation. no source line. no way to verify.

cerna

Led global operations at Precision Medtech, including multi-site manufacturing and supply chain.¹ ²

¹ PMED 10-K, mar 2025 p.42 — "Operations · Alvarez · SVP"
² Precision Medtech press release, 2023-06-14 — appointment announcement

A separate QA pass — running in a clean context, explicitly looking for what the generation pipeline got wrong — reviews every claim before delivery. Mis-attributed evidence, unsupported assertions, and vague sources are caught before the recruiter sees them. The shortlist you receive has already been challenged.

cost

$1,000*

per search. First one on us. Roughly 1% of a retained engagement fee, in exchange for a week of researcher time.

in-house researcher week cerna
cost per search $1,200 – $4,000 of loaded labor $1,000 flat
turnaround 3–5 days · gated on availability same day · no queue
consistency varies by who had bandwidth same discipline every run
sourcing implicit, rarely documented named source per confirmed claim
qa layer depends on partner review adversarial pass every search

* No subscription. No credit card for the first one. No trial that auto-converts.

boundary

Two territories. One seam.

Cerna is autonomous up to the sourced shortlist — and stops there. The judgment layer is the recruiter's, structurally, not as a caveat. Here is the split.

cerna's territory

Finding, vetting, sourcing.

  • Wide-net executive discovery (~150–200 per search)
  • Per-criterion qualification against your brief
  • Deep enrichment: role history, scope detail, depth signals
  • Named source citation on every confirmed claim
  • Adversarial QA before delivery
  • Contact data (email, LinkedIn, mobile) as a field
recruiter's territory

Fit, outreach, hire.

  • Fit judgment against the client and the culture
  • Reading the intangibles no brief fully captures
  • Deciding who is actually callable this quarter
  • Reaching out to executives directly
  • Presenting to the client
  • Making the hire.

Cerna finds the executives. You decide who's right.

try it

Give Cerna a live brief.
See what comes back.

The first search is on us. Same pipeline. Same sourcing discipline. Same QA bar as a paid one.

Get Your First Search for Free →

No credit card. $1,000 per search after that.

sources
  1. Every claim in a Cerna shortlist carries a source citation. This page carries them too — so you can see the sourcing discipline before you submit a brief.
  2. Confirmed criteria cite a specific, locatable source — LinkedIn profile URL, named press release, named SEC filing. Ambiguous evidence is named as ambiguous, not resolved by assertion. Source: /how-it-works → sourcing.
  3. $1,000 per search. Fixed price, no subscription, no trial that auto-converts. Source: /pricing.
  4. A Tier 3 source — "company website," "public sources," "publicly available data" — fails QA and does not appear in the delivered shortlist.
  5. Assumes retained engagement fees in the $75,000–$200,000 range. Source: /pricing → math.