Today's candidate is next year's client.
Retained search runs on relationships that change role over time. The finalist who missed out in March is a hiring executive by the following spring, and a referral source after that. Run a CRM and an ATS side by side and you are keeping that person in two places, agreeing with neither. This is not high-volume recruiting and it does not want high-volume recruiting software.
Sound familiar?
The same human lives in two systems
A CRM for relationships, an ATS for candidates, and one person entered into both. They drift apart immediately, and the drift is invisible until somebody is embarrassed in front of a client.
Relationships go cold silently
Nobody decides to stop talking to a good candidate. It just happens, and there is no queue anywhere telling you it has been fourteen months.
Placement is treated as the finish line
Most firms sell the months after the start date and then run that part out of memory and a calendar reminder somebody set once.
The client sees too much, or nothing at all
Sharing a slate means a PDF, an email thread, or giving a committee a login to a system full of your internal notes and your fee.
Admin is a tax on the person who does the work
In a boutique firm the principal is in meetings all day. Every minute of data entry comes straight out of the thing clients are actually paying for.
What we build for executive search
One record per person, roles earned by activity
Candidate, client contact, referral, placed. The same record carries whichever apply, on one timeline, so your network compounds instead of fragmenting.
Business development through to search
A deals board for BD, and a won deal that becomes a live search in one click, promoting the company as it goes.
Pipelines with scorecards against the spec
The position spec, the candidate pipeline, and assessments scored against the dimensions you actually agreed with the client.
A client portal you control candidate by candidate
A no-login link per search showing only the people you have made visible, with assessments, a comparison table and a feedback box. Internal notes, votes and fees never leave the building.
Post-placement care, generated automatically
The 30, 60 and 90 day, six month and one year check-ins created the moment a placement lands, so the thing you sell is enforced rather than remembered.
Capture without leaving what you are doing
Log a call or advance a candidate from any screen. Meeting transcripts and forwarded email arrive as drafted interactions with the participants already identified.
Proof from your world
Two promises the software industry hates making
One monthly fee, starting at launch
Design, development, hosting, and support in one number you can budget like rent. No hourly meters, no change-order invoices, and no per-seat fees that grow with your team. Billing does not begin until version 1.0 is live and your team is using it.
See the plans →You own the custom code. All of it.
The repository, the documentation, and the infrastructure are in your name from day one. If you ever leave us, you take everything and any developer can pick it up. No ransom, no rebuild, no being trapped in someone else's platform.
How we work →Questions we hear from executive search
How is this different from your staffing and recruiting page?
Different business, opposite requirements. High-volume staffing needs throughput: bulk sourcing, requisition dashboards, time-to-hire metrics. Retained search needs the opposite, a small number of relationships handled carefully over years. We build for both and we do not pretend one system serves them, because the design decisions genuinely conflict.
Will it send candidate emails automatically?
No, and in the system we built for a retained firm that is architectural rather than a setting you could switch on. The system drafts, a human approves, a human sends. That decision came out of the horror stories every search principal has about a rejection landing beside an offer. If you want drip sequences firing off stage changes, we are the wrong shop and you would fight this every day.
Our clients are search committees. Can they see the slate?
Yes, and this is where a purpose-built portal earns its money. A no-login link per search, showing only the candidates you have flipped visible, with assessments and a side-by-side comparison, plus somewhere for committee members to leave feedback that comes back to your pipeline. This maps almost exactly onto how nonprofit, academic and board searches actually run.
We looked at the big ATS platforms. Why custom?
Because they are priced per seat and built for volume, and you do dozens of engagements a year where every record deserves attention. The honest test is what you would actually use. If the answer is a relationship graph, a pipeline, a client-facing slate and post-placement follow-through, that is a build rather than a migration project.
Who owns the data?
You do, in a database on your own infrastructure, with export always available and no shared or AI-training environment. For a firm whose entire asset is a private network, that tends to be the part that decides it.
Tell us what's slowing your business down.
In a free one-hour call we map what the platform needs to do and tell you which tier it lands in. Within two business days you have a written plan and a monthly number. No proposal theater, no pressure.
One monthly fee · Built, hosted & improving · You own the custom code