You Can't Run a $95B Market on Spreadsheets and Gut Feel

01 /The Concept

Executive search firms spend roughly 10% of their working hours on documentation – preparing materials that present employers to candidates and candidates to employers. This is bespoke work, fundamentally different from standard recruitment.

The nuance: an executive search firm can't simply send a candidate a job link. The candidate might ignore it, or worse, approach the company directly. The firm needs to "sell" the opportunity – crafting a compelling pitch that explains why this specific role is worth the candidate's attention, without revealing the employer's identity.

On the flip side, the firm can't send an employer a raw resume. It needs to "sell" the candidate – building a persuasive brief that explains why this particular person is the right fit, supported by curated excerpts from the resume and interviews, while also protecting the candidate's identity to prevent the employer from making direct contact.

Spott built an AI platform to handle this documentation work for executive search agencies.

One module manages inbound candidate flow. The agency inputs a list of target employers and roles it wants to fill. The AI engine monitors for new openings and automatically drafts anonymous opportunity briefs in the agency's house style – ready to send to qualified candidates with minimal editing.

When candidates respond and go through interviews, a second module takes over. The recruiter feeds the platform a job description, a candidate resume, and interview transcripts. The AI generates a candidate brief for the employer – framing the candidate compellingly, pulling relevant quotes from the resume and interviews, while omitting identifying details. The recruiter reviews, edits if needed, and sends.

Spott is ultimately building toward full-cycle automation: job discovery, candidate matching, and all correspondence in both directions.

Pricing starts at $500/month billed annually. A 50% launch discount is currently available for early adopters.

Spott is a very early-stage company – it entered Y Combinator late last year and published its launch announcement on YC's site just recently.

02 /Why It Matters

Executive search is a surprisingly large market – and it has been growing fast. From 2012–2015, global revenues ran at around €10B annually. By 2016–2020, that had climbed to €17–18B. The market jumped to €27B in 2021 and €35B in 2022.

Projections put the market at $58B in 2025 and $95B by 2030. At that scale, automation tools have serious revenue potential – and the growth trajectory means the workload is only increasing, which turns automation from a nice-to-have into an operational necessity.

There's a more interesting structural shift underneath the growth numbers. As AI agents take over more routine work inside companies, every human employee is effectively becoming a manager – directing AI workers rather than doing the task themselves. That changes the hiring calculus. Companies will treat every human hire the way they currently treat executive hires: as a deliberate, high-stakes, highly customized decision.

If that plays out, every staffing agency will eventually need to operate with the methodology and tooling that executive search firms use today. The platforms built for executive search now will have a significant head start.

Sam Altman wrote – about a year after ChatGPT's launch – that he expects AI to achieve superhuman persuasion long before it reaches general human-level intelligence. "This could lead to very strange outcomes." Whatever those outcomes turn out to be, one fact is already clear: AI is being deployed heavily in platforms built to persuade.

AutoGenAI ([covered here](/review/prostoj-sposob-ubedit)) has raised $65.3M for an AI platform that generates compelling pitches, proposals, and tender submissions.

Uman ([covered here](/review/ispolzuj-sverhchelovecheskoe-masterstvo-ubezhdenija)) raised €2.5M for an AI platform purpose-built for complex B2B sales preparation.

In that framing, placing a senior executive is just a complex B2B sale – the product being sold is a person rather than a software package, but the persuasion mechanics are essentially the same.

03 /Opportunities

The direct opportunity is building platforms that automate executive search operations, along the lines of Spott. The market is large, growing, and underserved by automation – a combination that's hard to find.

The thing to watch for is the inflection point when "executive search" expands to cover all human hiring. Agencies that position early for that transition will have a structural advantage.

A broader opportunity sits underneath: AI for persuasion at large. If Altman is right that superhuman AI persuasion is coming before general intelligence, the applications are wide open.

AI for B2B sales is already an established category. AI for executive candidate placement is a less obvious but equally logical application. The non-obvious domains worth exploring are the ones where persuasion is already the bottleneck – grant writing, fundraising pitches, expert witness preparation, regulatory submissions. Any high-stakes written argument that currently requires expensive specialist time is a candidate.