We Don’t Just Send CVs: What Executive Search Actually Involves

The recruitment process can feel like a black box, for clients and candidates alike. You give an agency a brief, or you have an initial conversation about a role, and then nothing. You wait. You wonder what is actually happening behind the scenes.

So here is the curtain pulled back a little. We do not fire over a pile of CVs and hope one sticks. We are nosy, we are thorough, and we are not afraid to tell a client when their brief is making their own search unnecessarily difficult.

The reality check: why your talent pool might be tiny

A successful search is about aligning what a business wants with what the market can actually provide. Sometimes those two things are miles apart.

We worked recently on a senior role in Scotland. The brief was tight and the geographic requirement was tighter. Rather than searching LinkedIn and hoping, we targeted specific industry frameworks, cross-referenced manufacturers and mapped every person who could realistically do the job.

The result: the pool was tiny. Around thirty people in the whole country fitted the exact brief, and roughly half of those were never going to move.

Instead of presenting three passable CVs and crossing our fingers, we went back to the client with the hard numbers. We explained precisely why the pool was so small and set out the options — opening up adjacent sectors, or widening the geographic net. They listened, we adjusted the brief, and the search succeeded.

That is the difference between a CV sender and a search partner. Telling a client something they did not want to hear was the single most useful thing we did on that assignment.

Range finder candidates

We do not wait for a perfect shortlist before showing profiles. Early on we deliberately include a few range finders — people who sit slightly outside the core brief but bring genuinely transferable skills.

The point is to test flexibility. It tells us whether a client really needs ten years of specific sector experience, or whether they would actually prefer a rising star from an adjacent market. Discovering that in week two rather than week ten saves everybody a great deal of time.

What this means if you are a candidate

If we are calling you, it is not because you appeared on a spreadsheet. It is because the research has been done and we think you are genuinely good at what you do.

When we speak, we are not going to read a job specification at you. We want to understand the mechanics of your current role: whether your targets are personal or team-based, what your push and pull factors are, and what actually gets you out of bed in the morning.

We will also be straight with you. If the commute is going to be difficult, we will say so. If the base salary is lower but the bonus is significant, we will talk it through properly. There is no value in selling a dream that becomes a problem on day one.

The best part of the job is the relationships. We speak to a lot of capable people every week, and even when the role in front of us is not right today, understanding what you do want means we know when it is worth calling you back in six months.

The bottom line

Executive search should not be a transactional numbers game. It is deep research, honest conversations, and occasionally telling people things they do not especially want to hear.

If you are building a leadership team, or you are a senior candidate quietly wondering what else is out there, the conversation is always worth having.

Collingwood is a retained executive search firm. Here is how we run an executive search assignment, start to finish.