Boutique. Deep network. Rigorous process. Vetted talent… Are any of these in your executive search firm’s marketing copy?
Because, if it isn’t already obvious, most other executive search firm websites are also making these same four claims. Read a dozen of them back to back and the only real way to tell them apart is the logo in the corner.
So what exactly is setting you apart? (By the way, you might want to take notes, because this is how you crush your competition.)
Here’s the thing, I’ve done that reading, more of it than I’d recommend to anyone. The strange part is that almost none of those firms are exaggerating. Technically, the claims are true. They just don’t say… well, anything, actually.
Like plenty of other good firms, maybe you’ve sat down to fix the About page, gotten three paragraphs in, and ended up with something that read like everyone else’s anyway.
Why is it so hard to write one sentence about your own firm that a competitor couldn’t legitimately paste onto their own page word for word?
Fret not my friend, I got you. Before you rewrite another line, I’m going to explain the specific mechanisms that’ll take your marketing copy from pedestrian same-o to stand-out impressive.
The swap test
Here’s the diagnostic, and you can run it on your own website this afternoon. Take any sentence that describes what your firm does or how it works. Now visit your closest competitor and picture pasting that exact sentence onto their page, unchanged. If it would still be true over there, that sentence carries no information about you.
Try it. I’ll wait.
The principle underneath is falsifiability. A claim carries information only if a competitor could credibly assert the opposite. Run the standard search firm vocabulary through that test and almost none of it survives.
Nobody markets a shallow network. Nobody advertises a careless process or unvetted candidates. When every competitor asserts the same attribute and no competitor asserts its negation, that attribute stops working as a differentiator and starts working as a category label. “We run rigorous searches” conveys exactly what “we are an executive search firm” conveys.
It’s the same reason a menu promising fresh ingredients tells a diner nothing. No restaurant anywhere advertises stale ones. The words take up space and read like a claim, but they move nobody, because the opposite was never available to claim in the first place.
The buyer-side data backs this up. Gartner found in 2021 that 64% of B2B customers can’t tell the difference between one supplier’s digital experience and another’s, and 76% reported doing nothing differently after engaging with supplier content at all. That’s most of the buying population processing an entire category as interchangeable.
Now, buying a retained search isn’t like buying software. Your mandate gets decided over months, through referrals and conversations that no survey captures. But those conversations start somewhere, and for most buyers that somewhere is a website they read before they called anyone. The shortlist gets built at exactly the stage Gartner measured.
Which is a rough thing to read if you’ve been writing this copy yourself, at night, between active searches. That’s the normal condition in this business, and it’s exactly why the generic version keeps getting published.
Why the search category is more exposed than most
The industry is unusually fragmented. Roughly 5,500 firms operate in US executive search, and not one of them holds more than 5% of the market. AESC, the global membership body, represents more than 16,000 professionals across 1,450-plus offices in 70-plus countries. Whichever way you count it, your buyer is looking at several thousand firms they have no prior basis for ranking.
Think about that from their side of the table. They aren’t choosing between you and two others they know well. They’re choosing between you and a category.
No firm holds meaningful share, but a handful of names are the ones every buyer has heard of, and recognition is what breaks a tie. Unless you’re one of those names, your positioning does almost all the work of separating you from whoever’s open in your buyer’s next browser tab. Generic vocabulary means that work isn’t happening at all.
What it costs
Have you ever lost a mandate to a firm you’re fairly sure does worse work than you do?
Most people who’ve been at this a while have one specific loss in mind. It still comes up years later.
When a buyer perceives no meaningful difference between suppliers, they don’t stop deciding. They switch to whatever criterion still discriminates, and in professional services that’s price or brand recognition. Ordinary commodity behavior. Faced with two identical bottles of water on a shelf, nobody researches the watershed. They take the cheaper one, or the label they’ve seen before.
For a retained firm, that’s the worst outcome, because the two firms that win on those criteria are the biggest global brand and the cheapest contingent shop. Charge a premium fee and you’re sitting in the one position where neither tiebreaker helps you. You aren’t the recognized name. You aren’t the low bid. A comparison decided on those terms is one you lose before your buyer has read a word you’ve written.
What makes a claim do work instead
Gartner’s 2019 research on what it calls “sense making” points at the alternative. Customers who got supplier information they found genuinely helpful in rationalizing a decision were 3x more likely to close a larger deal with less regret. The copy did cognitive work for the buyer instead of just throwing generic descriptive attributes at them.
That’s the function. At the sentence level, the form it takes is precision.
There’s a finding in consumer research that lands directly on this. Precise numbers read as more truthful than round ones. Zhang and Schwarz found that people infer that a precise figure (when communicated by a human) is less likely to be an estimate, and therefore more likely to be something someone actually measured. Janiszewski and Uy showed the same effect in negotiation, where precise opening prices produced smaller counteroffer adjustments than round ones did.
You already know this from outside of work. Someone who says they’ll be there in twenty minutes is guessing. Someone who says eighteen has checked something. The number carries an implied claim about where it came from, and we all price that in without being asked to.
Applied to your copy, the whole difference shows up inside one sentence. “We have placed 31 CTOs into Series B and C SaaS companies since 2019” would be doing something structurally different from “extensive experience placing technology leaders.” The first invites verification. The second forecloses it. Buyers feel that difference even when they can’t articulate why.
The four cliché families and what each is substituting for
Scale claims
“Deep network.” “Global reach.” “Extensive database.” “Unparalleled access.” These are substituting for a named population.
What actually belongs in that slot is a defined universe. How many people actually fit the profile, and how many of them you have a current relationship with. Plus where those two numbers came from. A firm that’s done that work can write a sentence shaped like this: “There are roughly 400 people in North America who have run engineering through a Series B to Series D transition in the last five years, and we’ve spoken with 130 of them since January.” Whether your real figures are 400 and 130 or something else entirely, a sentence built that way has described a network. “Deep” has described nothing.
Quality claims
“World-class sourcing.” “Top-tier talent.” “Vetted candidates.” These are substituting for a stated standard.
It’s better to name the screening criterion, then name what it excludes. For example, you can say you disqualify candidates who’ve never operated without a dedicated support function, and you’ve said something falsifiable. Something a competitor is free to disagree with. That last part is the test.
Relationship claims
This is the family I see abused most, and I have some sympathy for it, because the feeling behind it is usually real. “Trusted partner.” “True extension of your team.”
But what’s missing is a described mechanism, and the fix is naming what actually happens in the work. Specifically, the thing that wouldn’t happen at a transactional firm. A firm that delivers a written market map in week one, before presenting a single candidate, and then revises the role specification with the client based on what that map turned up has described a mechanism. Your buyer can picture it. They can ask you about it, and hold you to it in month three. Name the artifact or name the meeting, and a feeling becomes a process someone can evaluate.
Identity claims
“Boutique.” “Niche-focused.” These are substituting for a stated constraint. Boutique tells your buyer nothing at all. “We only run searches for companies between $10M and $80M ARR, and we turn down enterprise mandates” tells them what you’ve given up to be good at one thing. A specialization that costs nothing to claim doesn’t read as a specialization.
The pattern across all four is the same. The cliché is sitting exactly where a number, a standard, a constraint, or a mechanism belongs. It’s load-bearing filler, which is why generic copy is so persistent. Strike the cliché without supplying the replacement, and now the page has a hole in it. Firms reach for this vocabulary in the first place because the underlying specifics were never assembled.
And that’s the part most firms aren’t always ready to commit to, because writing specific copy is an exercise in taking stock, and that takes time and deliberation.
Where the raw material actually comes from
You almost certainly hold the inputs already and have never pulled them out.
Your placement records have completion rates in them, and time to placement broken out by role type. Retention at 12 and 24 months too, if anyone was tracking it. Your intake notes have the recurring failure pattern you see in a segment, the one you find yourself explaining out loud in every first meeting.
And then there’s the input I almost never see a firm publish. The mandates that you turned down.
Declined mandates outperform everything else because they carry a cost. Say you declined 40% of inbound mandates last year, explain the criterion you used, and you’ve made a claim no competitor can copy without either matching that discipline or lying about it. Run that sentence through the swap test and it fails to transfer. Which is the whole point. Any claim that won’t survive being pasted onto a competitor’s website is a claim that describes your firm instead of your category.
Where the vocabulary has to change first
Priority order matters here, because rewriting everything at once isn’t realistic when you’re already buried in live searches.
Prospect conversations go first (before anything’s been signed). That language costs nothing to change, and you use it every time a prospect is deciding between you and whoever else they called. A cliché on your website gets skimmed. Say it out loud to someone who’s still choosing and they’ll ask what you mean by it, and either the specifics are there or they aren’t.
Fee justification copy goes second. It’s the one moment your buyer openly asks what the premium buys. A cliché delivered right there sends them straight back to price.
Website and outbound copy go last. They mostly reflect whatever vocabulary you’ve already internalized everywhere else, and rewriting the site first tends to produce a page you don’t talk like in the room. Buyers catch that gap faster than they catch the copy.
I know putting the website last sounds backwards, since the website is usually what starts the whole conversation about messaging in the first place. My take is that fixing it first just buys you a better-written version of the same mismatch.
The one way this backfires
Specificity without substance is worse than a cliché. A precise claim that turns out to be inflated is verifiable, which makes it falsifiable in the wrong direction. A cliché merely gets ignored. A fabricated number ends the conversation permanently.
Doing the work to surface those realities ensures your copy is clear and verifiable. And in a sea of marketing vagueness, durable specificity will set an unattainable bar for your competitors.