New · SD Hiring Intelligence

Everything we can verify about a talent market, in one report.

A commissioned research report on a talent market you're about to hire in. It maps who the people are, what they're actually paid, who you're competing with, and where movement is happening.

Commissioned against your brief. A consultant signs off every finding.

0:00 / 1:24
25+years of market-leading search
50+verified sources, minimum, per report
60+countries delivered in
97%right-hire, first-time record

Trusted by leading organisations across industrial, energy, life sciences and advanced technology

Heineken Halma Flex Sanmina Jabil Amphenol Ingersoll Rand Dr. Reddy's Michels
The starting point

The market got louder, not smarter.

Every AI cycle follows the same pattern. A wave of new tools, a wave of new claims, and a hiring leader left to work out which of them do anything. We watched it closely, because we operate in the same market our clients do. What we saw wasn't a hiring industry getting smarter. It was one getting louder. More dashboards. More claims that couldn't be traced back to an outcome. The noise wasn't a side effect of the AI age. It was the defining feature of it.

Our view was simple. The firms that win the next phase of hiring won't be the ones with the most tools. They'll be the ones who can cut through the noise and hand a hiring leader something true, something specific, and something they can act on the same day. Hiring Intelligence is a research product, not a subscription and not a dashboard.

Everyone was selling us dashboards. What we needed was someone to tell us what the data meant and what to do about it on Monday. That's the difference.

Chief People Officer · Energy & infrastructure, 12 countries

What it answers

Three questions every critical hire turns on.

Every report covers all of them. Your brief decides which one leads.

Market visibility

See the whole market, not the small percentage who applied.

Every search runs on a picture of the market. The only question that matters is how much of the market that picture contains. Applicants are self-selecting. Referrals are bounded by who your team already knows. A database is bounded by who last updated a profile. None of that is the market. It's a sample, and it isn't a random one.

In-depth talent mapping starts from the other end. Define the market first, then find every person in it — named, placed, and assessed for how reachable they are.

A shortlist is only as good as the market it was drawn from. Most are drawn from whoever was easiest to find.
Six brightly lit dots inside a small ring labelled Who Applied, surrounded by several hundred fainter dots forming the wider market, enclosed by a far larger ring labelled The Actual Market
Compensation reality

What the market pays, not what the advert says.

Almost every stalled offer traces back to a number set on poor information. Advertised ranges are positioning, not payroll. Published surveys describe a market that existed when the data was collected. Internal bands describe a decision somebody made a few years ago, adjusted for inflation and optimism.

Compensation analysis works from what the market is doing now — actual packages inside the competitor set, base against variable, the premium a specific scarcity carries, and the distance between what someone earns today and what it will take to move them.

You can negotiate a bad number. You can't negotiate a number that was never in the market.
Two horizontal range bars. A short grey bar labelled Advertised Range sits above a longer green bar labelled What the market actually pays. The distance between where the two bars end is shaded and labelled the part you never see
Timing signals

Know who's about to move, not who's already applied.

Most hiring runs on a snapshot: who is available today, in this market, at roughly this number. It's the least useful version of the question, because the strongest people are almost never available on the day you happen to ask.

What moves them isn't an advert. It's a reorganisation, a stalled promotion, an acquisition, a leader leaving, or a team carrying vacancies it can't fill. Those things are observable well before they show up in anyone's job search.

By the time someone is officially looking, you're competing on money. Before that, you're competing on the offer itself.
Three rows of people-dots on a track running from Not Looking to On The Market. One dot in each row has drifted to the right, tagged Restructure, Passed over for promotion and New leadership, each stopping at a dashed line marked We Reach Them Here, well short of On The Market
What you get

All eight sections, in every report.

Whatever the brief. The brief sets the depth, not the contents.

In-depth talent mapping

Who they are, where they sit, how reachable.

Compensation analysis

What the market pays, not what adverts claim.

Competitor analysis

Who you're hiring against, and how they're built.

Churn signals

Which teams are loosening, and why.

50+ verified sources

Paid and public, cross-checked before stated.

SWOT analysis

Your position in the talent market, plainly.

Strategic or operational framing

Board recommendations or a working view.

Built around your brief

Your industry, your locations, or one role.

Scope

Scope it to the level the decision needs.

Industry

A full view of one talent market: supply, demand, movement, and the competitors shaping it.

Location

Compare countries, regions, or cities on talent depth, cost, and accessibility before you commit.

Role

One business-critical position, mapped in depth: named talent pools, compensation benchmarks, and approach routes.

How it's built

Search-led, verified, signed off.

01

Search-led foundation

25+ years of live search delivery across 60+ countries. Consultant knowledge frames the questions worth asking. The data answers them.

02

Verified sourcing

A minimum of 50 sources per report, paid and public. Every figure verified and attributed. If it can't be stood behind, it doesn't go in.

03

Synthesis and sign-off

Our in-house AI platform assembles the picture at a pace manual research can't match. Consultants sign off every finding before it reaches you.

When to commission one

If you're at one of these points, it will pay for itself.

Before a search starts, to scope a business-critical role on evidence instead of instinct

Entering a new market, standing up a new location, or building a function from nothing

Mid-search, when the shortlist is thin or the brief isn't landing in the market

Benchmarking compensation ahead of an offer, a counter-offer, or a review cycle

After a search has stalled, or a hire hasn't worked out and you need to know why

Where it came from

Our clients asked. We'd already seen why.

Two signals pointed the same way. Our 2026 Voice of the Client programme asked clients, unfiltered, what was keeping them up at night. One request came back more than any other: give us the data to map our market, and help us manage hiring proactively instead of reacting to it. We'd reached the same conclusion from the other direction, after 25 years inside these markets.

Neither signal on its own would have been enough. A request without conviction gets you a feature; conviction without the request gets you a product nobody wanted.

36client interviews
29companies
165,000employees represented
$75bncombined revenue

“Our clients have been crying out for this, and we could see the real value in building it. Both mattered. We know this market, and they told us in their own words what they needed most.”

Gavin Speirs · Chief Executive Officer, Solutions Driven
We'd been told the talent pool was thin. The report named forty-one people we hadn't seen, and showed us what it would actually take to move nine of them. We'd been hiring against a fraction of the market without knowing it.

Group Talent Director · Industrial manufacturing, 6,000 employees

Questions

Before you commission one.

How is this different from a compensation survey?

Surveys describe a market that existed when the data was collected, aggregated across companies that may look nothing like yours. Hiring Intelligence works from what your competitor set is paying now — actual packages, base against variable, and the premium a specific scarcity carries in your market.

Is it a subscription or a platform we log into?

Neither. It's a commissioned research report. You scope it against a defined brief, we build it, a consultant signs off every finding, and you receive a report you can put in front of a board or a hiring manager the same week.

What does it cost, and how long does it take?

Both are scoped to the brief — a single role is a different piece of work from a multi-country industry view. Tell us the market you're hiring in and we'll come back with scope, price and timing before you commit to anything.

Do we have to run the search with you as well?

No. Hiring Intelligence is commissioned on its own. Plenty of clients use it to brief an internal team, an existing supplier, or their own board. It comes from the same firm that backs its placements with 12 to 18 month guarantees, so the analysis is built to be acted on either way.

Where does the data come from, and can we see it?

A minimum of 50 sources per report, paid and public. Every figure is verified and attributed in the report itself — if it can't be stood behind, it doesn't go in. You can trace any number back to its source.

You mention AI. Who actually checks the findings?

Our in-house AI platform assembles the picture at a pace manual research can't match, but a consultant signs off every finding before it reaches you. The synthesis layer is the product; the sign-off is what makes it usable.

See a live report

The fastest way to judge it is to look at one.

Book a conversation and we'll walk you through a live report, or scope a brief of your own — the industry, the location, or the one role you can't afford to get wrong.