The empirical replacement for the SHREK black book.
Every legacy executive search firm runs the same closed-loop inventory: four recycled candidates from the partner's personal rolodex, dressed as a shortlist, billed as a retainer. We replace that with algorithmic shortlist construction over 2.4 million tracked profiles across 36 jurisdictions, swept against named bias vectors and delivered with the full retrieval trail in 72 hours.
The closed-loop black book is a structural fraud against fiduciary duty.
The retained-search model has six structural defects. Each one is enough on its own to invalidate the shortlist. In combination they convert "executive search" into a relationship-rent extraction.
The same ~3,000 executives circulate across SHREK firms for a decade. Your shortlist is the shortlist your peer rejected last quarter.
Four candidates is not a market — it is a billing convenience. It compresses board choice to within consultant comfort.
Selection collapses to candidates the partner has personally met. Cross-jurisdiction, cross-industry and sub-CXO candidates are structurally invisible.
The board pack contains narrative, not evidence. There is no retrievable methodology to defend against regulator or shareholder challenge.
The board never sees the candidates it did not see. The shortlist is presented as complete by construction; it is not.
Every retainer terminates; the candidate research is destroyed. Nothing accrues to the institution's permanent successor inventory.
Algorithmic Shortlist Construction.
Seven stages. Each stage emits a versioned artefact retained in the engagement audit trail. The slate is reproducible end-to-end.
The role is decomposed into a regulatory perimeter, a strategic-outcome vector and a behavioural specification — not a job description. Every downstream filter is derived from this declaration and locked under version control.
We construct the explicit skills matrix the role will be held against by the operating regimes — ASX CGP 4th ed., UK CGC, SEC, MAS, EU CSDDD — before any candidate identity enters the system.
2.4 million tracked executive and sub-CXO profiles across 36 jurisdictions, refreshed on a 14-day cadence. Public filings, regulator registers, board observation transcripts, conference proceedings, peer-reviewed publications.
Candidates are matched against the locked mandate using behavioural telemetry derived from five years of public discourse and reconstructed decision logs — not a recruiter's recall.
The shortlist is swept against named bias vectors: tenure-proximity bias, sector-incumbency bias, jurisdictional-familiarity bias, gender, ethnicity, age. Each sweep is logged for audit.
We construct a parallel pool of equally credible candidates the board did not see, and surface them. The shortlist is incomplete until the counter-factual is named and rejected for cause.
A ranked, evidenced slate is delivered to the chair within 72 hours, with the full retrieval trail. Defensible to the regulator, the activist and the shareholder.
What the engine actually does.
Every tracked profile carries a five-year behavioural time-series. Search is over conduct, not over keywords.
Slates are built from declared mandate vectors, not partner intuition. The construction trace is retained.
Tenure-proximity, sector-incumbency, jurisdictional-familiarity, gender, ethnicity and age bias are explicitly modelled and removed.
Every slate is shipped with a parallel pool of equally credible candidates the board did not see — and the cause for their exclusion.
Candidates are scored against the regulatory regime they will operate inside, not the one their CV implies.
Coverage extends two layers below the C-suite. Dark-horse internal-equivalents are surfaced where SHREK firms cannot see.
Profile refresh cadence: 14 days. Material-change triggers (resignation, regulator action) update within 24 hours.
Approach can be conducted under code-name, double-blind, or chair-direct. Discretion posture is declared, logged and enforced.
Every recommendation carries a retrievable evidence trail. The slate survives regulator inquiry, activist scrutiny and shareholder litigation.
The coverage SHREK firms cannot match by construction.
SHREK coverage is bound by the size of partner rolodexes. Ours is bound by the surface area of the global executive labour market, refreshed continuously.
Time-to-defensible-shortlist vs. SHREK incumbents.
Calendar days from mandate declaration to slate delivery. SHREK figures are taken from published engagement-cycle disclosures and verified chair interviews. Our figure is contractual.
- — 9.4× faster median time-to-shortlist.
- — 4,412 board engagements delivered to this contract.
- — Every slate ships with a counter-factual pool.
Every search engagement permanently grows your successor inventory.
Search and succession are treated as one continuous capability, not two billing lines. The candidate research generated for a CFO mandate today is wired directly into the CEO successor slate tomorrow. The behavioural telemetry collected on a shortlisted COO becomes the bench evidence for an emergency CEO transition eighteen months from now.
The implication for the chair is structural: search is no longer a discrete event. It is a continuous ingestion process that the institution owns. The board never starts from a blank page, because the page is never blank.
SHREK firms cannot replicate this without dismantling their own business model, which is built on the destruction of engagement IP at the end of each retainer.
What the board loses by staying with SHREK search.
Eight to twelve weeks of CEO vacancy, market uncertainty and proxy exposure to receive four candidates the partner already knew.
When the regulator or the activist asks 'how did you arrive at this slate?', the only available answer is 'we trust the firm'.
The board cannot demonstrate it considered the alternative pool, because it was never shown one.
The candidate IP is destroyed with the retainer. The institution pays again for the same research on the next mandate.
Bias vectors are absorbed silently. There is no sweep, no logging, no remediation, no defence.
The sub-CXO layer, cross-industry pivots and non-anglophone executives — exactly the candidates who solve the actual problem — never enter the slate.
Run an empirical search your board can defend.
Mandate scoping, methodology disclosure and a calibration call with the search practice lead are available under NDA to sitting chairs, NomCo chairs and lead independent directors.