Case study · Executive recruitment Senior placements Singapore

Market mapping, automated.
Past data, finally compounding.

A Singapore senior-placements firm was doing manual market mapping for every search: eight hours of LinkedIn, references, and judgment per candidate, much of it repeating work done six months earlier on a similar search. I built an automated sourcing pipeline with intelligent filtering. The candidate pool grew 2 to 3×. Past hiring data is now searchable and compounds with every new search.

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−8h

Manual work per candidate

2-3×

Pool growth

Live

Full system

Functions built

Senior placements · Singapore

Before

Every search started from scratch.

The firm placed senior executives (VPs, country heads, C-suite) across financial services and professional services in the Singapore region. Each search began with a blank document and eight hours of manual market mapping per consultant: LinkedIn searches, talent stack reviews, reference cross-checks, judgment calls about who to surface.

The team was good at this. The problem was that the work didn't compound. The market map for a CFO search in financial services in 2024 didn't make the next CFO search easier in 2025. The notes lived in a Word file in someone's Drive folder. The candidates lived in a CRM nobody loved. The judgment calls (the actual value the firm sold) lived nowhere.

So the firm sold the same eight hours of judgment over and over. The candidates seen in past searches drifted. The shortlist for a similar role next year wasn't materially better than the one a year before.

"We were great at executive search. We were terrible at remembering we were great at it."

The managing partner, paraphrased from scoping

What I built

An automated sourcing pipeline that learns.

A custom build plus two follow-on phases. The data sources and filtering logic needed careful scoping with the partners.

Automated market mapping

Given a search brief, the system pulls candidates from the firm's data sources, filters by role / industry / seniority / geography, and produces an initial long-list within hours instead of days.

Intelligent filtering

Beyond keyword matches: trajectory, tenure patterns, industry adjacency, role progression. The system narrows hundreds of candidates to dozens worth a consultant's time.

Hiring data retention layer

Every search, every shortlist, every consultant note retained and searchable. The next CFO search inherits from the last CFO search. The judgment calls finally compound.

Consultant workspace

One view per active search: the long-list, the shortlist, the rejected (with reasons), the active conversations. Consultants stop juggling Word docs and Drive folders.

Client-facing search progress view

Anonymised view for the hiring company: where the search is, how the long-list is shaping up, what's next. Status updates stop being a phone call.

Timeline

The data layer took the time.

48 hours

Scope document delivered. Filtering rules locked, data retention model agreed, consultant workflow mapped, client view defined.

Day 7

Working MVP. Sourcing pipeline pulling candidates for one live search. Consultants reviewing real long-lists in the new workspace.

First phase

Core build deployed. Sourcing, filtering, workspace, retention layer all live. A follow-on phase scoped for the data-history backfill (turning the firm's Word docs into searchable structured records).

Full system

Full system live. Past hiring history backfilled and searchable. The next search starts from the firm's accumulated knowledge, not a blank page.

What this means

If your business sells judgment, the judgment should compound.

Every professional services firm sells expertise. Most of them lose 80% of that expertise the moment a project ends, locked in someone's notes, someone's head, or a Word doc nobody opens again. Building a system where the judgment compounds is the difference between getting better as a firm and just getting older.

Yours could be the next one

Build a system that turns expertise into compounding inventory.

No pitch. No proposal. I talk through your business, identify the bottleneck, and tell you honestly whether I can help.

Book a 30-minute call

Market mapping, automated.Past data, finally compounding.