How I work
The detail on what an engagement looks like — who it's for, what you get, what I won't do, and the questions I get asked most.
The firms I work with
The firms I work with most usefully tend to share four things:
- Retained executive search, not contingency or volume recruitment
- Five to fifty fee-earners — small enough that a workflow change reaches everyone, large enough that the time saved compounds
- A structured methodology rather than ad hoc, and a CRM the team actually uses
- An existing concern for consistency in what reaches the client
What lands at the end of an engagement
Scope drives the deliverable. A short pilot lands one workflow in use. A longer build lands several workflows, a custom application where warranted, and a handover that leaves the firm self-sufficient.
The workflow itself
- Configured AI workspaces— Claude Projects, Custom GPTs, or Microsoft Copilot agents with system prompts that encode your firm's voice, structure and standards.
- Prompts and templates — a tested library, plus the Word or Drive templates they sit inside. Editable by your team, not locked.
Making it stick
- An evaluation process— what "good" looks like for each workflow, and a QA step before anything reaches a client.
- Documentation— what each workflow does, what it doesn't, what to do when it produces something off. Plain English.
- Training— direct work with the consultants and researchers who'll use the tooling. As many sessions as the rollout needs.
- Slack or Teams support— once an engagement is underway, I'm on your Slack or Teams during UK working hours. Quick questions get quick answers; nothing waits for a scheduled call.
The handover
- A document that captures everything in one place — so nothing depends on me being available six months later.
- Optional extensions — for larger engagements: a custom application, CRM or document-store integration, or a search layer over historical data. Scoped per engagement.
Training built around your team
Adoption is where most AI consulting work quietly fails. Tooling that no one uses three months on isn't tooling — it's a sunk cost. Training is part of every engagement, and is available as a standalone piece of work where it makes sense.
One-to-one consultant training
Direct sessions with individual consultants and researchers, built around the workflows they actually do. Calibrated to where each person is, and grounded in the tooling that's been built for your firm — not generic prompt-engineering theory.
Wider firm training
Group sessions for whole teams or partner groups, designed to bring everyone to a working baseline. Particularly useful at the start of an engagement, or when a firm wants to bring its AI posture up across the board before deciding where to invest.
General AI literacy — referrals
For broader AI training that isn't specific to executive search — small business AI literacy, productivity tooling, general team upskilling — Maneform recommends specialist providers rather than offering a watered-down version. Happy to make the introduction.
Hands-on with the tools that matter
Maneform works across the established AI ecosystem and picks the right tool for the workflow, the data and the team. No partner programmes, no commissions, no recommendation tied to a vendor.
MicrosoftPlus the tooling layer around them — workflow automation, data pipelines, evaluation harnesses — chosen per engagement.
What I won't do
- 01Put AI in front of your candidates or your clients.
Approach messages, interview conversations, shortlist calls — these stay human. AI belongs upstream of the relationship, not inside it.
- 02Hand you a strategy deck and walk away.
Every engagement ends with working tooling your team can use the week after handover, with documentation they can return to.
- 03Act as your data protection function.
Senior candidate information is sensitive and sits under UK GDPR. I'll give you practical guidance on licence tiers, data residency and tooling posture so you start from the right place — but I'm not a lawyer, and I don't replace your DPO, your legal team or a formal DPIA. Anything contractually binding goes through your own counsel.
- 04Tell you that AI replaces judgement.
It replaces assembly. The judgement calls — reading a board, calibrating a candidate against a culture, knowing when to push back on a brief — are exactly where AI should not be.
- 05Recommend a tool I have a commercial relationship with.
I don't have any. The recommendation follows your stack, your data and your team's familiarity, not a partner programme.
- 06Publish your name on this website.
Maneform works confidentially and quietly. Client logos, case studies and named testimonials don't belong on a public site in a profession built on discretion. References from current and past clients are available on request, after an initial conversation.
Five questions worth answering
You can do some of it. Most firms who try get one or two consultants generating decent first drafts in ChatGPT and stop there — which leaves most of the value on the table and creates inconsistency in client-facing output.
The work Maneform does is the part that doesn't happen by itself: designing the workflow around the tool, building prompts that produce consistent quality at your firm's standard, getting the data and licensing right, and integrating the result into how your team actually operates.
That's the difference between AI as a personal productivity hack and AI as firm-level capability.
Engagements typically run £5,000 to £25,000 depending on scope, with shorter discovery work below that and ongoing retainers above. Pricing is based on the value of the workflow being built, not time spent.
Training for the consultants who'll use the tooling is included in every engagement.
Tooling costs — the AI subscriptions themselves — are separate, and typically £25 to £75 per user per month.
You'll have a clear scope and price before any work begins.
Discovery is the part most consultancies skim. I don't. It's typically two to four sessions over a fortnight — some on a video call, some onsite if it helps me see how the team actually works — plus shadowing a researcher or consultant through a live workflow where it's useful. The output is a written summary of where AI fits, where it doesn't, and what to build first.
From there, pilots on a single use case typically run two to four weeks. Full builds across multiple workflows run six to twelve weeks.
Quicker than most consulting timelines, because the unit of work is 'ship a tool the team can use', not 'produce a deck.'
Senior candidate information is sensitive and sits under UK GDPR. Maneform provides practical guidance on licence tiers, data residency and tooling posture so you start from the right place — but Maneform is not a law firm, and doesn't replace your DPO, your legal team or a formal DPIA. Anything contractually binding goes through your own counsel.
The most consequential decision is usually licence tier. Business and enterprise tiers of mainstream AI tools explicitly exclude inputs from model training; personal tiers don't. Getting that right is part of the engagement, not a footnote.
Executive search runs on discretion. Publishing client logos, named case studies or testimonials on a public site sits awkwardly with that — and the firms Maneform works with would, reasonably, prefer not to be listed. References from current and past clients are available on request, after an initial conversation.
The fact you can't see the client list before reaching out is the same posture you'd want Maneform to take with yours.
The next step is a conversation
Forty-five minutes, on a video call, no slides. With whoever runs your research function — and you, if you're not the same person.
We walk through how your team currently produces candidate reports, sector briefings, proposals and approach research, and identify the two or three workflows where AI saves the most time without compromising client-facing quality.
Within two working days you'll have a written summary: the workflows we identified, two or three recommended next steps, and indicative pricing for each. If nothing from the conversation warrants a proposal, I'll say so.
What do you want to solve?
Or just email
If you'd rather skip the form, write directly. Tell me about the firm, the problem, and what "good" looks like.
Once an engagement is underway, I'm on your Slack or Teams during UK working hours. Quick questions get quick answers; nothing waits for a scheduled call.