Beyond the CV: the documents executive search firms bill for, in your own template

Most CV formatting software was built for agency recruitment, where the deliverable is a reformatted CV. Executive search is different. By the time a candidate reaches a client in a retained search, they have been interviewed, assessed against a competency framework, often profiled with a psychometric instrument, and referenced. The client does not pay for a tidier CV. It pays for the consultant's view of the candidate, and that view reaches the client as a document.

Those documents take a long time to build. Each one pulls from several sources, the CV, the consultant's notes, rating sheets, a provider's results PDF, and each has a precise house layout the firm has refined over years: the cover page, the order of sections, the way ratings are drawn, the typeface of the headings. Associates and consultants spend evenings copying dates into career tables, redrawing rating bars and fixing page breaks. That is the work Formatix takes on.

The inputs are the same: a CV in any layout and any of 40+ languages, the consultant's notes, the ratings or placements your process produced and, in some cases, the results of a psychometric instrument. The output is always your template, not ours. Formatix builds the template from a document your firm already sends, or from your website branding if you do not have one yet, and keeps its fonts, colours, spacing and layout. Each document can be produced as an editable Word (DOCX) or PowerPoint (PPTX) file so the consultant can make final edits, as an Excel (XLSX) tracker where a table makes more sense, or as a PDF for sending on.

Because every report starts from the same template, a mandate's five finalist reports look as if one hand wrote them, even when three consultants and two associates worked on them.

Formatix does not assess candidates, rate competencies, place people on a 9-box grid or interpret psychometric results. It never administers, scores or interprets a psychometric instrument and never produces a Hogan, SHL or Saville report. You upload your notes and the results you hold; Formatix lays them into your report and draws the scores you supply as charts in your house style. Every document can be reviewed and edited before it leaves the firm, and nothing you upload is used to train AI models.

That division of labour matters in executive search, where the firm's reputation rests on the quality of its judgement. A tool that invented an opinion about a CEO candidate would be a liability. A tool that puts your opinion on the page, in your layout, gives you back the evening.

Formatix is used by retained executive search firms, and the same approach works for leadership advisory practices, interim management providers and in-house executive talent teams. The succession planning page is written for the CHRO and the head of talent rather than the search consultant, because they are the ones who build those packs. Whichever side of the table you sit on, the documents stay confidential: data is processed in the UK and EU under GDPR, and you can work in the platform, through the API, through the JobAdder integration, or from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity through the Formatix MCP server.