The longlist, by this afternoon.
Veft drafts the longlist from your firm's own records: the brief becomes explicit dimensions, your network is ranked against them, and every placement carries its evidence.
What a longlist costs today
In retained search the longlist is the first deliverable the client sees — and the one most firms assemble by hand: memory, spreadsheets, calls, a template filled late at night. Most of that week is assembly. The judgement — who genuinely fits this mandate — gets the remainder.
How Veft drafts it
- 01
The brief becomes dimensions.
Sector depth, leadership scope, languages — whatever the client weighs is defined explicitly, and those dimensions become the structure of everything that follows.
- 02
Your records are ranked against them.
Semantic matching across the firm's entire history, not keyword hits: who fits each dimension, and how strongly.
- 03
Evidence sits beside every name.
Each proposed placement shows why — dimension by dimension, drawn from the candidate's record. You accept, reorder or strike; nothing reaches the client unreviewed.
- 04
Names you hadn't thought of surface.
Profiles resembling a strong fit come forward — people met years ago on a different mandate, whom memory alone would not have produced.
- 05
The document follows in one pass.
The mandate's dimensions become the columns of the longlist and the structure of the report. Branded PDF or your Word template, ready to send.
The judgement stays yours.
Veft proposes the order and shows its reasoning. Every AI-drafted field is marked as such and remains editable; nothing reaches the client without a consultant's hand.
Frequently asked
- What is a longlist in executive search?
- The first structured list of candidates for a mandate — broader than the shortlist, assessed against the mandate's criteria, and the basis of the client's first review. In retained search it is often the first contractual deliverable.
- How long does a longlist take in Veft?
- An afternoon instead of a week: dimensions defined in minutes, ranking across your records running in the background, the client-ready document generated once you have reviewed the order.
- Where do the candidates come from?
- From your firm's own records first — the accumulated history of mandates, conversations and references. Public-source enrichment fills gaps; nobody is contacted automatically, ever.
- Is the longlist a document I can send?
- Yes. The same dimensions that drive matching become the columns of the longlist document — branded PDF or your own Word template, with provenance recorded per field.
Bring your next brief.
We will show you the path from brief to finished longlist on the kind of mandate your firm actually runs.