We recently built a course on Hector, specifically on delivery.

Not BD. Not cold calling. Delivery.

Because if you speak to most recruiters about where they lose the most time, right up there will almost always be: going round in circles on a search without a proper system behind it.

Adam Jennings has spent 10 years in recruitment, the last three at Add Some Zest, a specialist go-to-market recruitment firm. What makes Adam's approach stand out is not just that he consistently delivers. 

It's that he delivers in a way he can repeat, explain, and measure. His firm runs NPS as a core metric because, in his words, the outcome matters but so does the experience you create getting there.

That mindset runs through everything in this edition.

Over the next few minutes, you're going to get Adam's framework for running a world-class search. From the thinking you do before you open LinkedIn, to the company list you build before you approach a single person, to the sequencing that separates a focused search from a desperate one.

If you've ever finished a search wondering how you ended up there, or felt like you kept surfacing the same faces week after week, this edition is for you.

This edition is structured as a 5-step framework. Each step builds on the last. By the end, you'll have a complete process you can apply to your next live search.

Most recruiters start a search the same way. Brief comes in, LinkedIn opens, job title, experience, skills go in the filters, or you might create an advanced Boolean search. It feels like work.

It isn't.

The candidates you find that way are the same ones every other recruiter with the same job title is finding at the same time.

Adam is direct on this: the quality of your shortlist is almost entirely determined before you contact a single person. The thinking you do upfront, which companies to target and why, what the ideal profile actually looks like in the real market rather than on a job spec, and in what order you're going to work through it, that is where the outcome is decided.

It takes time. Maybe an hour before you start. For a complex or senior search, longer. Most recruiters skip it because it doesn't feel like activity. No calls made, no CVs in. But the ones who do it consistently find strong candidates early rather than spending three weeks expanding outward in desperation.

The other reason planning matters is repeatability. With a documented approach, you can look back and understand why a search worked or why it didn't. Without one, every search starts from scratch and every outcome feels like luck.

Apply it this week: Before your next search, block an hour before you open any search tool. Write down the companies you'll target and why. Write down what the ideal profile looks like in the real market. Then decide the order you're going to work through it.

The single most important thing you can do to improve a search is decide which companies you're pulling candidates from before you start looking at individuals.

The reason it matters: the company a candidate comes from tells you an enormous amount about whether they're likely to be right. 

In Adam's world of go-to-market recruitment, someone who has spent three years selling expense management software into CFOs at a mid-market SaaS business is a fundamentally different profile to someone doing outbound at a fintech startup, even if both LinkedIn headlines say Account Executive. The company shapes the experience. The experience shapes the fit.

So the question isn't just who's out there. It's who's out there from the right places.

Adam's starting point is always the hiring manager. Ask them directly: which companies do you most respect? Who have you lost deals to? Which organisations would you most want to take people from? 

This is one of the most underused questions in recruitment. Hiring managers know their market well and will often hand you a list of five or six organisations that should sit at the top of your search, before you've done a minute of your own research.

From there, layer in your own market knowledge. If you're newer to the niche, use AI to build a competitive landscape and then apply your judgement on which firms are most likely to produce the profile you need.

The output should be a ranked list. Not a vague sense of the market. A list you can point to and say: these are the organisations I'm prioritising, and this is why.

Apply it this week: On your next search, ask the hiring manager which companies they most respect and would most want to take candidates from. Build your target list from that conversation before you open any search tool.

Once you have your company list, the next decision is how you work through it. This is where most searches go wrong even when the planning has been done well.

The instinct is to go broad. Contact as many people as possible and see what comes back. Adam's approach is the opposite.

He structures every search around what he calls the bullseye. You start with the smallest, most precise target and expand outward deliberately, only when you've genuinely exhausted what's inside.

Ring 1 is the perfect fit. Candidates who hit every non-negotiable: the right background, the right market experience, the right seniority, the right commercial exposure. This ring might only contain twenty or thirty people. Work every single one before you move on.

Ring 2 is where you introduce flex. Maybe the candidate has come from an adjacent vertical. Maybe their deal sizes are slightly smaller. Still strong candidates, they just require more thought in how you position them.

Ring 3 is the exploratory space. Candidates who wouldn't immediately jump out as obvious fits but who have something about their trajectory, their competitive edge, or their transferable experience that makes them worth a conversation. Used sparingly, a ring-three candidate can sometimes be the best hire a client makes. Used as a default because ring one felt difficult, they will undermine your credibility.

The discipline isn't in the rings themselves. It's in the sequencing. You don't go to ring two because ring one is taking time. You go because you've genuinely exhausted ring one and you have the evidence to show it.

As Adam puts it: "We started from the perfect fit and built outward. Every profile we sent in the first week was someone the client immediately recognised as credible. That is how you build trust in a search early."

Apply it this week: Before your next search, write out who belongs in each ring. Set a minimum number of ring-one conversations to have before you expand. Track it.

You have a company list and a sense of the three rings. The next question is who you approach first and in what order.

Start with your existing network and CRM. Before you reach out cold, go through what you already have. Is there anyone in your database from one of your target companies you've spoken to in the last two years? A candidate you placed somewhere who has since moved into a relevant organisation? 

Warm contacts from the right background will always respond faster and more openly than cold outreach, and they're often a source of referrals before you've even had a proper search conversation.

From there, prioritise candidates who are most likely to be genuinely moveable right now, not just the ones who look best on paper. Someone three years into a role who has just been passed over for promotion is a very different proposition to someone six months in who is still finding their feet, even if their CVs look similar.

The more you work a market over time, the more you build a read on who's likely to be open and when. Company changes, leadership shifts, funding news, redundancy rounds: all of these create windows of receptiveness that a market expert spots and a generalist misses.

There's also a practical reason to be thoughtful about the order of approach within a single company. If you're targeting four or five people from the same organisation, don't contact them all at once. 

Pick your strongest targets first, stagger the rest, and let each conversation inform the next. If your first contact tells you the team is going through a restructure, that changes how you approach everyone else. If they mention a colleague thinking about a move, you have a warm lead you'd never have found otherwise.

A world-class search isn't a broadcast. It's a series of deliberate, informed conversations, in an order that makes each one more likely to succeed than the last.

Apply it this week: Before contacting anyone, check your CRM first. If targeting multiple people from the same company, stagger your approach and let each conversation shape the next.

This is the part most recruiters leave on the table entirely.

Every conversation you have, whether it results in a candidate moving forward or not, contains information that should make the rest of your search better. The recruiters who treat those conversations as data points consistently find stronger candidates, faster, than the ones who treat each call as a standalone event.

Here's what that looks like in practice. You speak to someone from one of your target companies and they're not looking right now. Before you end the call, you've learned what the culture is like, whether the team is growing or contracting, what the compensation structure looks like, and whether there are any colleagues who might be more open. 

None of that would have appeared in a LinkedIn search. But it's now shaping the rest of your search in ways your competitors, who made the same call and moved on, can't replicate.

Over the course of a properly run search, this builds into something genuinely valuable. Certain companies keep producing the same objection, which tells you something about their culture or comp. Certain candidates keep referencing the same names, giving you a shortlist within your shortlist. Salary expectations start to crystallise, giving you real data to take back to your client about what's realistic.

One of the most powerful things you can do mid-search is return to your client not just with CVs, but with genuine market intelligence they didn't have before you started. 

What are candidates saying about working at companies like theirs? Does anything in the brief need to flex based on what the market is telling you? 

This kind of update does two things at once: it demonstrates the depth of the work you're doing, and it keeps the client engaged rather than just waiting for a shortlist to arrive.

By the time you're ten conversations into a well-run ring-one search, you're a significantly more credible person to speak to about this role than you were at the start. That credibility comes through even in cold outreach and meaningfully increases the likelihood that the people you haven't yet reached will give you the time of day when you do.

Here Is An Example Of A Live Talent Intelligence Dashboard You Could Use: Download & Make A Copy Of It To Turn It Into A Version That Works For Your Desk

Apply it this week: After every search conversation this week, note one thing you learned that you didn't know before the call. At the end of the week, look at what you've built and ask: what does this tell me about the market I'm working?

Most searches don't fail because the candidates aren't out there. They fail because the process behind the search wasn't structured enough to find them.

What Adam's framework gives you is a system you can repeat. One where the quality of your shortlist is decided before you make a single call, where every conversation makes the next one better, and where you can show your client exactly how you got there.

The 5 steps: 

Work through them in order. Every time.

dP.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

#1: Do you listen to my podcast? I release a weekly episode with either a top-performing recruiter or recruitment entrepreneur to find out how they achieved their success so you can learn directly from their journey Check out my latest episode and subscribe to the show.

#2 Take the recruitment High-Performance Team Scorecard
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#3: Want to win more business, book more meetings, and level up your billings? Our Hector-certified courses are built by top billers who’ve been where you are and cracked it. No fluff. Just real, proven strategies you can use immediately >>>> Browse Courses – Start Closing More Deals Today (Use code Limitless_Learning at checkout for 15% off: exclusive to newsletter readers)