Talent intelligence for executive recruiters: a starter kit

Strip away the buzzword and talent intelligence is three things working together: a live, structured view of who exists in a market; a way to narrow that view using plain description rather than rigid syntax; and a way to turn the result into something you can act on or share.

The practical difference from traditional sourcing is where you start. Instead of starting from a job description and guessing at keywords, you start from a real person — a benchmark executive — and let the comparable talent around them define the market.

If you are trying this for the first time, keep the first search simple. The goal is to get comfortable with the basic loop before you worry about anything advanced.

Say you are kicking off a search for a Chief Marketing Officer at a mid-size retail company. You paste the profile link of a CMO you respect at a comparable retailer. Within moments, that person's employer, title and photo appear, followed by a stream of comparable marketing leaders — CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Heads of Brand — at similarly sized retail and consumer companies, grouped by function and ordered by seniority.

The executive summary highlights a few recurring patterns — for instance, a cluster of candidates with both brand and e-commerce ownership. You click that phrase to shortlist everyone it applies to, then refine further with a prompt like "CMOs with direct e-commerce P&L responsibility," bringing a pool of 150 down to a working shortlist of twelve.

A handful of prompt patterns work well across almost any function or industry, and are a good starting point while you get a feel for how narrowing behaves.

Once you have a shortlist you are confident in, the report step should take minutes, not hours. Export a PDF with the summary grid — name, firm, title and a one-sentence summary for each person — as the first page, followed by one full page per candidate.

For your own working file, or to share with a hiring manager who wants to click through to full profiles, export the same shortlist to Excel with clickable profile links. Keeping both formats available means you always have the right version for the audience — polished for the client, detailed for internal review.

As you run more searches, two features start to matter more: History lets you prompt across multiple past searches at once using multi-select, useful when you want to compare candidates across related roles without starting over. Projects let you save profiles across different searches into one standing list, which is how a single search becomes the beginning of an ongoing pipeline rather than a one-time exercise.

A few habits slow people down in their first week or two of using talent intelligence tools.

PeerSearch.ai's plans scale with how much searching you do. The Demo tier gives five free searches with every feature, including export, with no card required. Beyond that, Scout is $69 per month for 30 searches without export, Pro is $199 per month for 100 searches with full export, and Team is $149 per seat per month with a five-seat minimum and shared projects for recruiting teams working together. Credit packs are also available for occasional, non-recurring needs.

The best way to evaluate any of this is to run a real search on a role you are actually working, not a hypothetical one — the executive summary and prompt behavior are far more convincing on live data than in a description.

You can run one search at peersearch.ai/try right now with no login required, to see the basic workflow in action. When you are ready to go further, logging in unlocks five free searches with every feature, including export, so you can test the full process — mapping, prompting, saving to a project and exporting a report — on a role you are actively working before committing to a plan.