Case Study
How a Biotech Venture Fund's In-House Search Practice Catches Executive Career Moves Before Competing Firms
Company
A Biotech-Focused Venture Fund
use case
Executive Candidate Sourcing
company overview
A venture fund providing intensive support services to biotech portfolio companies, including a fully in-house executive search practice that places C-suite and senior scientific leaders instead of outsourcing to traditional search firms.
The fund runs its own executive search practice to place senior scientific and business leaders at portfolio companies. The data powering candidate discovery had gaps that affected who the team could find and whether outreach landed with the right context.
Biotech executives change roles more frequently than typical corporate hires. Scientists take consulting engagements between full-time positions, cross between academia and industry, and join early-stage companies months before any public announcement. Standard data providers refreshed profiles on multi-month cycles, and the gap showed.
When a candidate moved to a new role, the team's data still showed the old title for weeks or months afterward. At the VP and C-suite level in biotech, outreach referencing the wrong title reads as mass-produced. That first message is the entire pitch, and a wrong title kills it
The candidate pool for any given biotech executive role is small and specialized. Missing a transition by even a few weeks can mean losing the placement to a firm that reached the candidate first with accurate context. Lower response rates from out-of-date outreach shrank the qualified pipeline further, stretching searches from weeks into months
Every late contact was a portfolio company waiting longer for a critical hire. A vacant Chief Scientific Officer role during a clinical trial readout or a funding round can stall the entire company. Slower searches turned a recruiting problem into an operational one
The team's internal search product tracked all known profile URLs for each candidate to support entity resolution. Over time, those URLs accumulated problems.
Each candidate had multiple profile URLs. Some returned 404 errors, some redirected, some were active. Without scraping every URL individually, there was no way to tell which were valid, and recruiters worked from a database they could not fully trust
Engineers spent sprints writing cleanup scripts to identify and remove broken URLs instead of building matching algorithms or search filters for the internal product
The fund's ability to scale the search practice depended on that internal product improving. Every sprint lost to data hygiene was a sprint that kept the practice at its current capacity instead of growing it across the portfolio
The team also built supplemental scrapers to fill data gaps left by their primary provider. Maintaining those scrapers became its own burden.
Running scrapers at the scale the team needed meant constant maintenance: rotating proxies, managing rate limits, updating parsers whenever source pages changed format. The scrapers existed only because the primary data provider left gaps
They were a workaround, not a strategic investment, but they consumed engineering time as if they were a core product feature. Portfolio companies used the internal search tool, not the scraping pipeline, yet the pipeline ate the hours
The People Enrichment API with real-time fetching goes directly to the source and returns the current state of any professional profile, not a cached version that may be months behind
The team benchmarked hundreds of profiles against their existing provider, and Crustdata picked up job transitions first while core employment history matched accurately across comparison sets
In executive search, seeing a role transition before a competing firm sees it means reaching the candidate first with the right context
When the team sends an outdated or changed profile URL to the People Enrichment API, the response comes back as an error instead of returning outdated data. The team runs their full URL list through the endpoint and programmatically separates valid profiles from broken ones in a single pass
What used to require engineers scraping each URL individually and checking whether a real page came back now runs as an automated cleanup job, and the candidate database stays accurate without consuming engineering time
The Watcher API tracks profile changes for candidates of interest: role transitions, new company affiliations, title updates that signal openness to a conversation
The team plans to use this for portfolio-wide monitoring alongside active searches, tracking executives whose career moves align with upcoming hiring needs across portfolio companies
When a tracked candidate's profile changes, the system alerts the team, turning passive watchlists into timely outreach without anyone manually checking hundreds of profiles
Real-time enrichment surfaces role transitions before other providers deliver the same signal, giving recruiters a window to contact candidates before competing search firms reach them
Outreach lands with accurate titles, roles, and company context because the profile data reflects where the candidate actually is. When the first message is right, response rates go up, the pipeline fills faster, and the fund collects more placement fees per quarter
Automated 404 detection replaced manual URL scraping for entity resolution, and the supplemental scrapers the team built to fill provider gaps are no longer necessary. All the maintenance overhead that came with them is gone
Engineering sprints previously lost to data cleanup are now available for product work. The internal search product improves faster, and the fund can take on more concurrent searches across its portfolio
Career transitions that previously went undetected for weeks now surface within days. Longlists for senior scientific roles are more complete because the team sees candidates' current positions, not where they were months ago
Portfolio companies get stronger shortlists for their most critical hires, which reinforces the fund's pitch to founders: invest with us, and we place your leadership team too