An executive search can take months. Dozens of conversations, countless resumes, endless evaluations, numerous vetted candidates. And yet, when it’s all over, many contingent and retained firms leave their clients with just one outcome: the single candidate who gets hired.

The rest of the talent pool (and the valuable data it holds) often goes back into the retained and contingent firm’s files, ready to benefit their next client instead of you and your organization. But what if it didn’t end there?

Unlike traditional methods, informed search delivers a report that turns a single hiring effort into competitive intelligence you own and can keep using to guide future searches. Here’s how it helps hiring leaders optimize their recruitment strategy and create pipelines built to last.

Stop Chasing “Unicorns” with a Clear View of the Talent Market

Some roles are so specialized —or so new — that the perfect candidate simply doesn’t exist. Too often, organizations hold out for a “unicorn” profile the market can’t deliver, stalling the search. Competitive intelligence captures the current state of the market, uncovering details such as:

  • Skill availability across markets and industries
  • Roles and specialties facing critical shortages
  • Transferable skills that align with hard-to-fill positions
  • Candidate expectations for responsibilities and career paths

With that knowledge, leaders can adjust job requirements, redistribute responsibilities or reframe a role so it fits both the market and the business need. Instead of waiting for the impossible, they gain a path forward that leads to a successful hire.

Leverage Real-Time Pay & Perks Data to Strengthen Offers

Published salary reports often lag behind reality, and generalized data can lead to misguided offers. Competitive intelligence collects role-specific, current compensation data directly from candidate conversations, giving employers a clear and accurate picture of the market, including:

  • Base salary, bonus structures and total compensation packages
  • Desired salary ranges and negotiation thresholds
  • Benefits details, such as health insurance and retirement plans
  • Operational budget size for nonprofits

Armed with this, employers can design offers that balance competitiveness with cost control, align benefits with candidate priorities and speed up offer acceptance. The result is fewer stalled negotiations, reduced time-to-hire and a stronger close rate on top-choice candidates.

Make Your Offer Stand Out with Competitive Intel

Every candidate conversation holds the potential to reveal what competing employers are offering and how they’re approaching recruitment. Competitive intelligence captures and organizes these observations into actionable data, including:

  • Competitor-specific compensation benchmarks and incentive trends
  • Common benefits structures offered in similar roles or organizations
  • Observations on competitor timelines, role requirements or team structures

This information gives hiring leaders an accurate benchmark of how they stack up in the market. Promoting unique perks can be especially powerful since 23% of job seekers say they’d take a 5.4% pay cut for a role that better fits their lifestyle.

Pinpoint the Causes of Candidate Withdrawals

Losing a top candidate hurts twice — once in the immediate search and again when the reason for the loss is never revealed. A competitive intelligence report tracks down the “why” behind candidate decisions, eliminating that blind spot with intelligence like:

  • Reasons candidates decline offers (compensation, location, culture fit, etc.)
  • Triggers for candidate withdrawals or employer rejection during the process
  • Clear attribution of who made the decision — candidate, client or recruiter

Using these insights, hiring leaders can spot recurring barriers such as salary misalignment, job scope concerns or slow decision-making. Over time, they can adapt job design, streamline processes and improve candidate experiences to reduce losses and keep high-value talent engaged.

Apply Historical Hiring Data to Future Strategies

While most search data vanishes with the hire, competitive intelligence builds an archive that can be analyzed for trends and performance improvements over multiple searches, revealing historical insights such as:

  • Geographic sourcing patterns
  • Volume of hires over time
  • Placement history by role type or level
  • Return on investment comparisons to retained and contingent models

This cumulative data becomes a playbook for future recruitment. It highlights where searches succeed, where bottlenecks form and how to adjust strategy for stronger, faster results backed by evidence rather than assumptions.

Why Guess with Contingent & Retained Search When You Can Hire Informed?

Most executive search models stop short. They deliver a single hire, close the file and walk away, taking with them everything you could have learned from the rest of the talent pool.

Duffy Group’s informed search changes that. Built on the foundation of Duffy Recruitment Research™, it transforms each search into a source of enduring market intelligence, capturing details on every vetted candidate. That means you’re not only making the right hire today, you’re gaining intelligence you own and can keep using as a living knowledge base to:

  • Fine-tune compensation and benefits
  • Anticipate competitor moves
  • Remove recurring barriers to acceptance
  • Shorten time-to-fill on future roles

Connect with our expert recruiters to strengthen your hiring strategy with real-time intelligence that helps you win top talent today and create a lasting edge in every search to come.