Case Study
How a global executive research firm built an internal recruiting platform for 200 recruiters
Company
Executive Recruiting Firm
use case
Building an internal recruiting tool
company overview
A global executive recruiting firm specializing in retained search with 200-250 in-house recruiters spread across the US, Europe, and Latin America. They are building a proprietary talent intelligence platform to run the entire retained search workflow internally.
The firm was stitching together a handful of data vendors, none of which were built for how retained search actually works.
Stuck on Legacy Sourcing Tools They Couldn't Own
Their primary sourcing tool was the same one every firm defaults to giving them no edge in their sourcing
There was no way to pipe that data into a proprietary platform; the firm was paying a large annual contract for access to someone else's data, with no export, no ownership, and no moat
Tools they evaluated as alternatives fell apart in non-English-speaking markets, a real problem when you're filling senior roles at international companies
The Data They Had Was Inaccurate
Their people data enrichment vendor ran on quarterly batch refreshes, a cadence that did not work for passive C-suite candidates and as a result they missed out on many potential candidates
The same vendor had identity resolution problems: different professional profiles getting merged into one record
Too Many Vendors, Too Much Overlap
The firm was pulling sourcing from one vendor, email enrichment from a second, and phone numbers from a third, while candidate monitoring was not being run at all
Retained search margins are already thin; stacking three or four overlapping tools with no single provider covering more than one stage of the workflow made the economics worse every month
Crustdata became the data infrastructure layer underneath their proprietary platform: real-time people and company data, mapped to each stage of the retained search lifecycle.
Real-Time Candidate Intelligence
The platform runs candidate searches through Crustdata's People Search API the moment a client submits a role filtering by seniority, industry, geography, company, and full career history.
Our search API pulls data from the web at the moment of query ensuring the most accurate candidates with the freshest data are surfaced
Our Watcher monitors shortlisted and placed executives on an ongoing basis. These are webhooks that fire daily o when profiles are edited, job history changes, or hiring-signal keywords appear in social posts
Full career history included in the candidate profile, enabling pattern matching against career trajectories of executives
One Embeddable API Replacing the Vendor Stack
Instead of stitching together three or four vendors, each covering one slice of the workflow, the firm runs everything through a single API.
Person Enrichment delivers business email directly; phone numbers through a separate waterfall
Market mapping, longlisting, enrichment, and ongoing monitoring through one provider
Our API plugs directly into their proprietary platform enabling them to own the data, the workflow, and the product
Owned Data Pipeline, No More Rented Infrastructure
Exiting legacy sourcing contract - this budget was reallocated to building their own platform on Crustdata's API
Full data workflow owned end to end for the first time which allowed them to source candidates based on their proprietary sourcing workflow
The platform becomes a defensible asset. Investors could underwrite the business on proprietary technology and data ownership instead of an external dependency that any competitor could also use
Candidate Intelligence That Reflects Reality
Recruiters reach candidates while they're actually open to a conversation, not after the window has closed. Fill rates go up, time-to-shortlist comes down, and the firm stopped losing placements to competitors who reached out to candidates first with better data