Executive Search Editing and Proofreading Services

A search firm is paid a third of a first-year package to produce something a board can act on, and what the board receives is often four CVs with a covering paragraph each. The candidate the client eventually hires will run a business; the document that persuaded them to make an offer described a career rather than an argument. When the hire fails at eighteen months, the post-mortem tends to find that the concern nobody wrote down was the one that mattered.

We edit what executive search and board advisory firms produce — candidate assessment reports and shortlist documents, role specifications and position briefs, market maps and talent landscape reports, competency and success profile frameworks, interview guides and structured question sets, reference and background summaries, offer and compensation recommendation papers, board effectiveness and succession reviews, diversity and slate composition reporting, client proposals and credentials documents, candidate-facing role briefings, and onboarding and first-hundred-days material. Our editors work on the document a board actually reads before appointing.

The candidate assessment report is the deliverable, and the version that helps a board is the one willing to be wrong in writing. A report that says a candidate is a strong communicator with a proven track record of transformation tells nobody anything; it would fit all four candidates and it protects the consultant rather than informing the client. We write these so each assessment opens with a position — the specific reason this person can do this job, in one sentence a chair could repeat; so the evidence is drawn from what the candidate actually did rather than the scope they held, since running a £400m division is a fact about an employer and not about a person; so the reservations section is real, naming the concern, its severity and what would test it at interview, because a report with no reservations is not an assessment; so the comparison across the shortlist is explicit about the trade-off the board is choosing between rather than pretending all candidates are excellent; and so language about fit is unpacked into observable behaviour rather than left as a judgement nobody can interrogate. Boards that get these make faster decisions and better ones.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including candidate names, client mandates and assessment material. We are editors rather than search consultants, employment advisers or assessors, and we offer no view on candidates, hiring decisions or process. What we can do is make an assessment say something a board can act on.