Executive Search Editing and Proofreading Services

Four resumes reach the board with a paragraph of commentary attached to each. The firm's fee is a third of the first-year package. The person the board appoints will run a business, and the document that persuaded the board to make the offer described a career. Eighteen months later, when the appointment has not worked, the review usually finds that the concern nobody wrote down was the one that mattered.

The documents we edit for Executive Search

Candidate assessment reports and shortlist documents sit at the center of this work, followed by role specifications and position briefs. Market maps and talent landscape reports, competency and success profile frameworks, and interview guides with their structured question sets come next. Reference and background summaries, offer and compensation recommendation papers, board effectiveness and succession reviews, and diversity and slate composition reporting arrive in the same volume. Client proposals and credentials documents, candidate-facing role briefings, and onboarding and first-hundred-days material round out the list. Our editors work on the document a board reads before it appoints anyone.

What the editing involves

An assessment that helps a board is willing to be wrong in writing. "A strong communicator with a proven track record of transformation" fits all four candidates on the shortlist and commits the consultant to nothing. The version that helps opens with a position: the specific reason this person can do this job, in one sentence a chair can repeat in a meeting the consultant is not attending. We do not form that view. The consultant does, and the view arrives with the draft; our work is to see that the sentence says what the consultant meant and that nothing later in the report quietly withdraws it.

Evidence drawn from scope is not evidence about a person. Running a $400 million division is a fact about an employer, while what the candidate decided, changed, or stopped inside that division is a fact about the candidate. We mark every sentence that describes the size of a job and ask what the person did in it. The answer usually exists in the consultant's interview notes and has simply not reached the report.

The reservations section is where a report earns its fee, and it is the section most often written as a formality. A reservation reading "may find the pace challenging" names nothing that could be tested. A concern needs its name, its severity in the consultant's own words, and the question at interview that would settle it. Comparison across the shortlist works the same way: stating the trade-off between the candidate with the operating record and the candidate with the market relationships is more use to a chair than four paragraphs each concluding that the candidate is excellent. Language about fit belongs in observable behavior, described as something the candidate did on a stated occasion rather than left as a judgment nobody can question.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including candidate names, client mandates, and assessment material. We are editors, not search consultants, employment advisors, or assessors, and we offer no opinion on candidates, hiring decisions, or process. What we can do is make an assessment say something a board can act on.