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category

Research Practice

Finding a name is rarely the hard part of an executive search. Confirming what's actually true about that person — and being able to show the sourcing behind every claim — is where research either holds up or falls apart. This category covers that discipline directly: how candidates are found beyond an obvious database pull, what separates a confirmed detail from an assumed one, and what a shortlist needs to contain before a client should trust it.

13 posts

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research-practice

Active Sourcing in Executive Recruitment: What It Actually Means

In most recruiting, active sourcing is a lever you pull when the responsive channel underperforms. In executive search, there is no responsive channel to fall back on — which changes what the term should tell you.

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research-practice

What AI Candidate Screening Actually Involves

Screening is a rubric applied to evidence, one criterion at a time, with three possible verdicts. That is a specific job. Here is what an AI model does well inside it, and what it needs around it before the verdicts can be trusted.

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research-practice

What LinkedIn Recruiter Actually Covers, and Who It Never Sees

LinkedIn Recruiter searches one of the largest indexes of working professionals ever assembled. The index is written and kept up to date by the people in it — which is exactly why the most senior, least visible candidates are the ones it's built to miss.

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research-practice

Candidate Sourcing Tools: What Each Category Is Actually Built For

Executive search firms rarely settle on one sourcing tool. They stack several — because each covers a different edge of the problem, and none of them tells you whether what it found is actually true.

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research-practice

What Makes an Operations Executive Search Different

A VP Operations title tells you almost nothing on its own. Here is what a strong operations executive search reconstructs instead, and where the usual proxies mislead.

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research-practice

How a Board Search Differs from an Executive Search

A board search runs through the same motions as any other executive search. What is actually being evaluated is different enough that treating a board seat like another senior role produces a candidate who looks right and fits badly.

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research-practice

What Candidate Sourcing Services Actually Include

The label covers everything from a raw list of profiles to a fully evidenced research pass. The variation is almost never in what's promised — it's in what's checked before a name reaches you.

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research-practice

Executive Search Best Practices for Candidate Research

Most best-practice lists are things nobody disagrees with. These are the six that cost something to follow — which is why they are the ones that get dropped.

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research-practice

How a CEO Search Actually Works

The research is not what makes a CEO search hard. The hard part is that the client is a committee that has not yet agreed what it is hiring for.

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research-practice

How to Screen Executive Candidates

Executive CVs are written to survive a scan. Screening at this level means reconstructing what someone actually ran — from sources other than their own description of it.

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research-practice

How Executive Search Researchers Actually Find Candidates

The candidates you never see cost more than the ones you reject. Discovery is a recall problem, and recall is decided early — before anyone starts judging.

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research-practice

How to Shortlist Candidates for an Executive Role

Every shortlist is built by throwing people away. The question is whether you can say, for each person you cut, which requirement they failed and what you looked at.

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research-practice

What a Good Executive Search Shortlist Actually Contains

Most shortlists are a list of names with a paragraph attached. That is not enough to walk into a client call with. Here is what each entry owes you.

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