5 Sets of Terms Signed From Candidates He Never Pitched For

Kyle Maslen runs commercial and C-suite search across payments and fintech at Ignite Talent Group, placing go-to-market talent into London, New York and Zurich.

Speccing a candidate out to the market is one of the oldest plays in recruitment, and it still works. Kyle's problem was never that it stopped working. It was what it cost him to run it.

Seven to eight hours per candidate. Read the CV properly. Work out who would actually want this person. Find the hiring manager at each target company. Write the anonymized profile. Send it. Chase it.

Most of a day, to reach three or four companies. That is the real economics of manual speccing. The effort is fixed and the reach is tiny.

So he did it rarely. When a play costs a full day and returns four conversations, it never becomes a habit. It becomes the thing you do when you have a quiet afternoon, which is never.

Strong candidates sat on his desk doing nothing. Every one of them was a reason for a hiring manager to take a call. None of them were being used that way, because there were not enough hours in the week to use them.

That is the trap. The best BD asset in a recruitment business is the candidate you already have, and manual speccing prices it out of reach.

We took the entire speccing workflow off Kyle's desk. He sends a CV. That is the whole of his involvement.

Twenty minutes later the campaign is live. Not a draft, not a task queue. Live and sending.

The candidate gets read properly. Seniority, sector, deal size, the specific commercial experience that makes them worth a conversation.

The right companies get mapped. Not the four he could think of, but the actual addressable market for that specific person across payments, fintech and financial services.

The hiring manager is found at each one. Named decision maker, not a generic careers inbox.

The anonymized profile is written and sent. Same quality of write-up Kyle would produce himself, at fifteen times the reach.

Interested replies land in his mailbox. He turns those into calls, and he closes them himself.

The deliberate design decision: the system stops at the reply. Nothing automated books the meeting, negotiates the fee or signs the terms. Kyle is a machine at converting a warm conversation, so the system's only job is to put more of them in front of him.

This one is worth reading carefully if you already believe speccing works and still barely do it.

1. The bottleneck was cost, not the play. Kyle did not need convincing that speccing generates business. He needed it to stop costing a day. Most agencies misdiagnose this as a motivation problem and try to solve it with activity targets.

2. Reach is the variable that actually moves. The write-up quality was never the issue. Going from four companies to fifteen per candidate is what turned an occasional play into five live processes.

3. The automation closed nothing. Those companies signed terms because someone they wanted to hire landed in their inbox before a competitor got there, and because Kyle converts. The system just put him in front of a properly mapped market.

4. The pipeline came from candidates he already had. No new sourcing, no new data, no new spend on lists. This was BD extracted from an asset that was already sitting on the desk.