Most hiring teams have experienced recruitment process before, but not all have experienced what a thorough, strategic search really involves.
A hire might have been made. But much of the work remained reactive, and most of the market remained unexplored.
Good search looks different.
And once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to go back.
It starts with sharper questions and a clearer understanding of what success in the role actually means. Often, this leads to a full refinement of the existing job specification, because the original version usually doesn’t reflect what’s truly needed when read through with context.
A proper search process starts with research and creating a map of the full market. Not just active candidates, but the entire landscape – across company size, scaling stage, industry or market served, geography, tech stack, and level. This often includes adjacent profiles just below and just above the role to get a true picture of your options, and clever strategies to expand that map.
It also means understanding the value proposition. What makes this role meaningful for the person you hope to attract? Is it a chance to grow? A stretch role? A second-time-around opportunity, but at scale?
From there, targeted messaging needs to be crafted for different segments of the audience – those who are more senior, those who look like they could be just below the targeted level incase they can grow into the role. The goal is to engage high performers, most of whom are currently thriving and not searching. These individuals are selective. They only move for roles that represent real forward motion in their careers and need to be approached in the right way – in a way that speaks specifically to that.
Manual, thoughtful outreach matters here. When done well, it leads to high engagement and quality conversations, giving you a stronger talent pool.
You can automate this and hope for a five percent response rate, or take the time to send a few hundred personalised messages and reach response rates of up to seventy percent. There are AI tools that claim to bridge this with personalisation, but even well-designed AI sequences still feel like what they are. Candidates can tell. So I’d skip those for the roles where your potential talent pool is not that big, and the role is important.
Once you’ve begun those conversations, you need to meet with those who respond, and present the role in an appealing, but honest way. When you’re reaching out to passive talent, the usual screening shortcuts don’t apply. This means more conversations and more time than a role where you rely on applicants.
The upside is that while many of the most promising profiles will disappoint you, some of the ones you had the least faith in will surprise you. It often plays out that way.
Their career context won’t be on their LinkedIn profile, especially if your requirements are layered and precise. If done properly, after what could be twenty five to thirty-five of these interviews, you’ll have a solid talent pool to work with, depending on the kind of role.
This process is time consuming, even if the market has already been well mapped by a team that knows it well.
It also requires skill, not just in assessing talent, but in positioning the opportunity in a way that builds real interest and makes clear the alignment that exists. The positioning is the most important part. It determines who ends up in your talent pool.
It’s not a task to delegate to someone who doesn’t have business or positioning context and couldnt relate it to each individual in a way that is relevant to them. Done poorly, it risks losing out on people who might have been a strong fit if approached differently, and wastes the effort put into the mapping process.
This process isn’t convenient. It’s not a few hours of CV sourcing and some automated outreach. A manual, senior-led search takes between fifty and one hundred and fifty hours, depending on how broad the role is and how much refinement is needed along the way.
Not every role calls for this level of depth. But leadership roles, and any position that shapes your product, culture, or momentum – especially in growing or scaling businesses, deserve it.
After a search like this you can be confident in your ideas around what skill is out there, how closely aligned you can find someone against your needs and how realistic your budget and offer is. Without this, its all a bit of a guess – unless its the kind of role you hire for often.
This is what a thorough search looks like, and this is the kind of process your recruitment team should be following if you’re investing financially in the search, and its a high stakes role.
