For executive search
Six searches a year, and each one is a nine-month conversation.
Retained work does not fail on volume. It fails on the second tranche nobody invoiced, the guarantee that ran out unnoticed, and a client who last heard from you eleven days ago.
- Tranches with triggers
- Guarantees tracked, not remembered
- Nothing published unless you publish it
- Last client contact11 dayslongest this search
- Next trancheOn shortlistdrafts the invoice itself
- Guarantee on the last placement27 days leftcounted, not remembered
The commercial spine of a retainer
A retainer is a schedule, and the schedule should invoice itself.
Retained fees arrive in parts — on engagement, on shortlist delivered, on start date, or on whatever your engagement letter actually said. Each part is a small administrative event, and small administrative events are exactly what a nine-month search swallows.
CogniYukti holds the tranches on the placement: the sequence, what releases each one, and the amount. A tranche fires on its trigger or is released by hand when the client agrees the stage is done, and the invoice follows from there — with the guarantee period counted by the product rather than by the account manager.
- Exclusivity on the record —
Exclusive until a date, held on the assignment itself, where the person working it can see it.
- Nothing is published unless you publish it —
A search exists without a job posting attached. Confidential assignments stay off any careers page because posting is a deliberate act, not a side effect of opening a role.
- Guarantee, then replacement —
A breach is recorded against the placement, the replacement search links back to the original, and the credit note follows — so the commercial position is still legible a year later.
The committee problem
Four people remember the same candidate differently.
Senior hiring decisions are made by a group, and a group converges on whoever speaks first in the debrief. The disagreement is rarely about facts — it is about which half of the conversation each person is recalling.
CogniYukti puts each panelist's rating next to what the interview itself produced, competency by competency, and marks the rows where the panel and the evidence are furthest apart. It is not a veto. It is the row worth opening before the committee agrees with itself.
| Competency | P1 | P2 | P3 | P4 | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Systems design | 4 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| Stakeholder handling | 5 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Delivery under constraint | 3 | 3 | 4 | — | 3 |
| Regulated-industry exposure | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
Your client's side
A view of the search that is not a deck you build on Sunday.
Your client signs in and sees the longlist, the submissions, where each one stands and the interviews arranged. They can put up to five candidates side by side against the role's own requirements — including the ones each candidate does not meet.
It replaces the status call you were preparing for an hour. And because their responsiveness is measured on the same numbers they see, the eleven-day silence is visible to you before it is a conversation.
| What the role asked for | A | B | C | D |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P&L ownershipMandatory | ● | ● | ● | ○ |
| Scaled a team past 100Mandatory | ● | ○ | ● | ● |
| Regulated industryPreferred | ○ | ● | ○ | ○ |
| Board exposurePreferred | ● | ● | ○ | ● |
Being straight about fit
Where we would not be your first choice.
CogniYukti is strong once you are talking to people: the evidence from those conversations, the client-facing side of the search, and the commercial layer underneath it. Market mapping and off-limits tracking are not in the product.
If mapping tools are central to how your firm works, say so on the call and we will tell you plainly where we would fit and where we would not. A retained firm finding that out in month three is worse for us than losing the deal in week one.
What we are good at
Evidence from interviews, a client-facing search view, retained commercials, guarantees, and every back-office module that a search firm also has to run.
What we do not do
Market maps and off-limits registers. We would rather say it here than discover it together after you have moved your data.
What surprises people
That the same product runs your payroll, your invoicing and your own internal hiring — which is usually three more subscriptions.
Questions we get asked
The ones that decide it.
›Can a client see only their own search?
Yes. Portal access is scoped to that client's assignments, and you configure what a portal user can see.
›We run contingency work as well.
Both fit. Terms are set per assignment — retained schedules on one, fee terms and submission caps on another — in the same list, without a second system.
›What happens to a candidate we approached two years ago?
They are one person record with the history of that approach on it, rather than a CV that arrives fresh and gets worked from zero by whoever picks it up.
›Do you handle multi-entity billing?
Yes — several legal entities, their registrations and their invoicing are first-class, which matters once a firm bills through more than one company.
›How confidential is confidential?
Postings are opt-in, portal access is scoped per client, permissions run to the field, and every access is on an audit trail you can read.
Book a demo
Walk us through one assignment.
Take a search you are running now — the engagement terms, the tranches, the committee. We will set it up live and you can see the client's side of it.
- Set up the engagement terms and the tranches as they actually are
- Release a tranche and raise the invoice from it
- Show me the client's view of the search
- Open a panel divergence and the quote behind it
- Break a placement inside the guarantee and show me what happens
- Show me a search that is confidential and stays that way