Recruiting Research Blog by Intellerati
Intellerati Recruiting Research Blog
Intellerati’s Executive Search Research Blog shares insights on candidate sourcing, candidate identification, candidate development, talent mapping, diversity recruiting research, and executive succession planning best practices. By making executive search smarter, we make it more effective. In addition to our FAQs Page, our blog answers frequently asked questions about recruiting research:
How much does recruiting research cost?
What are the top recruitment research firms?
Why should I choose a search firm alternative?
Intellerati Blog Posts
LinkedIn Data Quality and the Art of Knowing What You Don’t Know
MLB Baseball executive Billy Beane figured out that everyone was measuring the wrong things. Nate Silver figured out that a model is only as honest as the inputs feeding it. In an era of AI-generated LinkedIn profiles, keyword-optimized resumes, and synthetic work histories, those lessons have never…
Why Use a Recruiting Research Firm?
Retained search fails to complete 40% of the time. Contingency search abandons searches that take too long. Job postings flood you with unqualified applicants. A recruiting research firm solves all three problems — and delivers competitive intelligence your other search options never could.
How Executive Search Research Boosts In-House Recruiting Results
The internal executive search function was built to do retained search's job better, faster, and at a fraction of the cost. For the most part, it succeeds. The ceiling appears at the VP+ level, on searches where the best candidates are not findable through conventional means — and reaching them requ…
Why LinkedIn Recruiter Can’t Replace Executive Search Research
LinkedIn has 1.3 billion members and the most powerful professional search interface ever built. It is also not a recruiter, cannot qualify a candidate, and has no way of telling you whether the profile you are looking at reflects the person who will show up on day one. Here is what LinkedIn Recruit…
What Does Executive Search Research Cost?
Executive search research pricing ranges from a few dollars per name to $30,000 a month — and the difference is not just price. It is what you receive, what it takes to turn that deliverable into a hire, and whether the research compounds into organizational intelligence or disappears when the engag…
How to Crush Candidate Sourcing
You can crush candidate sourcing and do it faster with AI. But no matter what candidate sourcing tools you use, they have blind spots. AI indiscriminately discriminates. So to excel at sourcing, talent acquisition must meet the moment and provide AI guardrails.
Accelerating Executive Talent Acquistion
Closing Executive Searches Faster Executive searches are moving at an unprecedented pace. In 2026, the “winning” candidate—the executive who is ultimately hired—is typically presented within the first 14 to 21 days of the search. In Q1 2026, the average time to present a finalist was jus…
In-House Executive Search Has Evolved Radically
AI recruiting tools have made candidate identification faster, cheaper, and more scalable than at any point in the history of executive search. For in-house teams managing VP+ searches in 2026, that is genuinely useful — and genuinely dangerous if taken at face value.
LinkedIn Member Profiles are a Beautiful Digital Mirage
LinkedIn's 1.3 billion member profiles look like an inexhaustible talent pool. For executive recruiters, they are something more complicated — a digital mirage that grows more convincing, and more treacherous, with every passing year. Incomplete profiles, unverified data, and no organizational conte…
What to Do When Linkedin Recruiter Falls Short
LinkedIn Recruiter is a powerful starting point for executive search. It is not a finish line. Disorganized data, incomplete profiles, unreliable filters, and InMail limitations have always made senior-level sourcing harder than LinkedIn's pitch suggests. In 2025 and 2026, three new problems have co…
Your LinkedIn Member Number: What It Reveals (and How to Find It) – April 2026 Update
Update April 2026: Not only can you find your LinkedIn Member number, but you can find the member numbers of any profile you view, simply by going to Chrome's menu and clicking on View -> Developer -> View Source. Next, check the word wrap box in the upper left-hand corner and then search for "follo…
View our complete Best of Blog Post Archive.
To recruit the best and brightest, candidate sourcing must lay down due diligence so can top candidates are not missed. They must reach beyond traditional recruiting resources, including LinkedIn, for competitive advantage. A treasure trove of prospective candidate information exists outside of resumes and social networks.
Of course, we don’t pretend to have all the answers. We welcome your comments on all of our posts. We invite your executive recruiting observations and your candidate sourcing tips and commentary. That is how we all learn together.