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Boutique Executive Search Firm
14-person boutique retained executive search firm operating across the UK and Switzerland, running on a Salesforce-built recruitment system.
Headline result
Saved ~30 hours per month of senior associate time. Discovery call to confidential profile in under 24 hours.
At a glance
Metric
Before FormaCV
After FormaCV
Time per candidate profile
42 min
7 min
Senior associate hours reclaimed / month
0
~30 hours
Assignment cycle time
baseline
-22%
Discovery call to client-ready profile
4-7 days
within 24 hours
Customer profile
- Industry
- Executive search
- Size
- 8 partners + 6 associates
- Geography
- United Kingdom and Switzerland
- ATS
- Salesforce-based custom recruitment system
- FormaCV plan
- Enterprise (with custom Salesforce integration)
- Customer since
- 2025
The challenge
Retained executive search runs on partner-led discovery calls, not job board CV intake. The firm's associates were spending 35-50 minutes per candidate writing up confidential profiles from call notes — and partner discovery calls were transcribed via Otter.ai but the transcripts sat unused because no formatter accepted them.
The bottleneck: every candidate profile required associate write-up time before it could go to the client. With 12-15 discovery calls per partner per month, write-up time was the binding constraint on assignment throughput. Confidentiality requirements added a second constraint — current employer name had to be redacted in early-stage profiles, and revealed only after interview confirmation.
“Our partners run 12 to 15 discovery calls a month each. The associate write-up was the rate-limit on the entire firm, and we were burning the most expensive hours on transcript translation.”
Why FormaCV (vs alternatives)
Three factors won the evaluation. First, call transcript handling — FormaCV is the only formatter that accepts Otter, Fireflies, and Gong transcripts as a first-class input. Daxtra Styler, Allsorter, and HireAra all required a CV file as the starting point. Second, custom Salesforce integration — the firm's recruitment data lives in a Salesforce-built custom system, and FormaCV's Enterprise plan included building the integration in 3 weeks. Third, confidentiality controls — audit log of every profile access plus controlled re-reveal of current employer name, gated by interview confirmation.
No other vendor in the evaluation accepted transcript inputs without first requiring the firm to rebuild every call into a CV file. That rework loop alone would have erased the time savings.
“FormaCV understood our problem instantly. The call transcript feature is not a checkbox in their roadmap — it is their core differentiation. For us it was the only viable option.”
Implementation
Weeks 1-3: custom Salesforce integration build by FormaCV's solutions team, including the controlled employer-reveal workflow. Week 4: partner and associate training on the discovery-call ingestion flow. Week 5: first discovery-call-to-profile workflow live, with the controlled re-reveal gated on interview confirmation in Salesforce.
The results
- Time per candidate profile: 42 min to 7 min — an 83% reduction. Associates now edit, not author.
- Hours reclaimed per month across the firm: ~30 hours of senior associate time.
- Assignment cycle time down by 22% — more candidates surfaced per assignment within deadline.
- Partner-to-client turnaround: confidential profile sent within 24 hours of discovery call (vs 4-7 days previously).
- Confidentiality audit trail: every profile access logged, with controlled employer-reveal tied to interview confirmation.
“Cycle time on a retained search is the partner's reputation. We just took 22% off ours without changing how the partners work — the associates simply stopped being the bottleneck.”
What's next
The firm is expanding FormaCV usage to long-list research dossiers and is piloting partner-side editing of profiles inside the formatter itself, removing one more handoff. Next quarter the team plans to layer market-mapping data into the same workflow so a discovery call ends with both a profile and a peer-set comparison ready for the client.
About Boutique Executive Search Firm
A boutique retained executive search firm with 8 partners and 6 associates, operating across the United Kingdom and Switzerland, focused on senior leadership and board-level mandates in financial services, life sciences, and industrial technology.