Run a confidential mandate without leaking it

A client who commissions a senior search is often buying the map as much as the placement. They want to know who runs this function at the twenty organisations that matter, how those people got there, which of them are movable, and what the market pays. That work is delivered weeks before a shortlist exists and is frequently the reason the mandate is retained rather than contingent.

Surhires holds the map as structured records: target organisations with a rationale for inclusion, the individuals mapped against each, the source of each piece of intelligence and its date, and a coverage state showing which parts of the universe have been worked. A researcher's progress is visible without a status meeting.

Because it is a record rather than a document, the map persists. The next search into the same sector begins with what the firm already knows, and a consultant joining the firm inherits ten years of mapping rather than starting from a public professional network.

A sitting divisional president does not create an account, upload a resume, or answer a screening questionnaire. The relationship starts with a conversation, often through an intermediary, sometimes over two years before anything happens. A system designed around an application flow has nowhere to put that.

In Surhires the record exists whether or not the person ever applies. It carries the career history the researcher assembled, the notes from every conversation, who introduced you, what they said about their own timing, their stated compensation and the caveats around it, and the searches they were considered for and why they were not progressed. There is no requirement for a resume to exist for a record to be complete.

Approach status is explicit throughout: not approached, approached and no response, spoke and declined, engaged, off-limits. That means a partner picking up a market can see what has already been said to whom rather than risking a second cold approach to someone a colleague spoke to last quarter.

Senior appointments are not signed off by a hiring manager. A shortlist goes to a chair, a remuneration committee, a nominations committee, sometimes an investor and occasionally a regulator, and each of those stages takes weeks. A pipeline that treats client interview as a single stage cannot describe a process with four gates and two committee dates.

Surhires lets the mandate define its own stages, including committee meetings as dated events with their own attendees and outcomes. A candidate waiting for a nominations committee that meets on the eleventh is not a stalled candidate, and the pipeline should not report them as one. A candidate waiting nine days for a chair to respond is.

Interview logistics reflect the same reality. Panels are senior, diaries are hostile, and meetings are often off-site and unlisted. Scheduling holds slots across the panel and keeps the detail inside the mandate rather than in a calendar invitation that names the client.

At executive level a reference is part of the assessment, not a formality after the offer. A firm may take six or eight, on the record and off, including people the candidate did not nominate, and the value is in the pattern across them rather than in any single response.

Surhires structures the referencing so it can be read as a body of evidence. Each referee is a record with their relationship to the candidate, whether they were nominated or sourced independently, the date of the conversation, and structured responses against the competencies the mandate defined, alongside the verbatim notes. The report to the client can then be assembled from the record rather than rewritten from a notebook.

Where a reference is given in confidence, it is marked as such and the restriction travels with it, so it does not appear in a document generated for the client by someone who was not on the call.

A search firm that places into a client is generally barred from recruiting out of that client for a period. Breaching it costs the account and sometimes more. In firms where the rule lives in a partner's head or a shared document, breaches happen through ignorance rather than intent, usually by a consultant in another office.

Surhires records off-limits agreements against client organisations with their scope, their start date and their expiry, and surfaces them at the point of search. A researcher mapping a market sees which organisations are protected and until when, before making an approach rather than after. Approaches to a protected organisation require an explicit override that is recorded with a reason.

The register also runs the other way. When an agreement expires, the organisation becomes workable again, and the firm knows that rather than continuing to avoid an account out of caution nobody has revisited.

A retained client mid-search wants evidence of work, and the evidence is the research: organisations covered, individuals identified, approaches made, conversations held, declines and their reasons, and what the market said about the package. A slide deck rebuilt by hand every fortnight is expensive and gets thinner exactly when the search is hardest.

Surhires derives the progress report from the mandate record, with the confidential parts excluded by the same restrictions that govern the rest of the search. A client can be given a portal view of one mandate without a seat and without sight of any other work the firm is doing, including work for their competitors.