Know who is in your UK market before you commit to hiring in it. We identify and profile the people who could do the role, show how competitors are structured, benchmark what the market pays, and tell you how long the hire will realistically take once notice periods and deferred compensation are counted.
We are a research consultancy, not a recruitment agency. Every project is a fixed fee for the research — never commission, never a percentage of salary. We hold no off-limits list, so no part of the UK market is closed to us. Every record we produce is handed over and stays yours.
Talent mapping is the structured research process of identifying and profiling the people who could fill a defined set of roles in a defined market, before a vacancy exists. A talent map records who those people are, which organisations employ them, their function, seniority, location and tenure, how the teams around them are structured, and — where scoped — what the market pays. It exists so that hiring and workforce decisions are made against researched evidence rather than against whoever happens to apply.
A talent map is a research asset, not a candidate list. It is commissioned to answer a business question — can we staff this plan, from where, at what cost, against which competitors, and how long will it take — and it keeps its value long after the first hire is made. Because Audentia clients own the data outright, a single UK map is routinely used for a year or more of hiring.
The research combines talent identification (finding the relevant people), market analysis (how large and accessible the population really is), competitor analysis (how rival organisations are built), and talent profiling (recording each individual consistently enough that people from differently-structured employers can actually be compared).
A comprehensive UK talent map layers each profile with the information that makes it usable: current employer, current role, function, seniority, location, tenure, career history, reporting line and organisational position, evidenced skills and industry experience — and, where the project scopes it, reward benchmarks and workforce composition data. What it never contains is anything obtained from confidential sources.
Sourcing starts with a live vacancy and looks for people who will apply for it now. Talent mapping starts with a business question and describes the entire relevant population, whether or not those people are available today.
The practical difference is coverage and shelf life. A sourcing exercise stops when a shortlist is full. A mapping exercise does not stop until the defined market is covered, which means it captures the people who were not looking, the ones who said no this quarter, and the competitor structures that explain why the market behaves the way it does. That is why a map keeps earning after the first hire, and a shortlist does not.
Talent mapping is used at the point where a plan is still reversible — before headcount is signed off, before a site is chosen, before a leadership team is designed, before an acquisition is priced. It answers the question underneath all of them: does the talent this plan depends on actually exist, in reach, at a cost we can carry? That is a different question from can we fill this role, and it needs a different kind of evidence.
For the full methodology and comparison frameworks in depth, see our main talent mapping service page. This page covers the UK market specifically. Operating in the United States? See talent mapping services in the USA.
Talent mapping is one of ten research services at Audentia Research, and the one most often used as the foundation for the others. These are the mapping and intelligence services most frequently commissioned by UK clients.
| Service | The question it answers | Who commissions it |
|---|---|---|
| Comprehensive talent mapping | Who exactly could do this, and where are they? | TA directors, heads of talent |
| Talent scans | Is there enough talent here to be worth a full map? | Workforce planning, TA leadership |
| Talent market mapping | How deep, accessible and expensive is this UK market? | Strategy, workforce planning |
| Competitor talent mapping | How are our UK competitors built, and where is their depth? | CHRO, strategy teams |
| Executive talent mapping | Who could credibly do this senior role, and would they move? | CEO, board, PE and VC investors |
| Leadership talent mapping | Who leads these functions across the UK market, and who is next? | CHRO, succession and OD leads |
| Talent research | Verified data on a defined UK population, to our specification | In-house TA, search firms, RPOs |
| Talent intelligence | What is happening in our market, and what should we do? | Leadership teams |
| Talent pipeline development | Who is engaged and ready before the role opens? | TA directors, heads of talent |
Ongoing, refreshable market insight rather than a point-in-time study. Audentia delivers this as a service in its own right.
Explore Talent Intelligence →Engaging and maintaining relationships with the mapped population ahead of live need, refreshed on an agreed cadence.
Explore Talent Pipelining →Discuss your UK talent mapping projectA 30-minute conversation is usually enough to scope it.
Talk to Audentia About Talent MappingTalent market mapping is the analysis of an entire talent market — its size, structure, geographic distribution, cost and accessibility — rather than of individual candidates alone. It answers whether a hiring plan is realistic in a given market before that plan is committed to. Talent mapping tells you who; talent market mapping tells you whether, where and at what cost.
The most consequential decision in any UK mapping project is the boundary, and it is the one most often got wrong.
The UK has an unusually strong concentration effect. For financial services, professional services, insurance, media and a large part of enterprise technology, senior populations genuinely are London-weighted, and a map drawn around London and the commuter belt will be broadly right. Apply the same assumption to life sciences, aerospace, defence, energy, advanced manufacturing or industrial engineering and you produce a map that misses most of the market — because those populations sit in the Cambridge–Oxford corridor, in Bristol and the South West, in Aberdeen, in the Midlands and across the North West.
There is no universal UK boundary. The correct boundary is function-specific and sector-specific, and getting it right is the difference between a map that gets used and a map that gets filed.
A material share of UK senior professionals now works for a London-headquartered employer from well outside London. Mapping by registered office postcode systematically undercounts the population available to a London role, and systematically overstates how London-bound that talent is.
We map by actual working location and realistic hybrid or commuting reach, not by where the employer's building is. For UK roles offering two or three days in London, that routinely widens the accessible population by a meaningful margin — and it is one of the most common corrections we make to a client's original assumption.
Sourcing begins with a live vacancy and looks for people who will apply for it now. Market mapping begins with a business question and describes the whole relevant market, whether or not those people are available today. Sourcing stops when a shortlist is full; mapping does not stop until the defined market is covered. That is why one expires with the vacancy and the other keeps earning.
The service most often commissioned by UK strategy and leadership teams rather than by HR — because the output is competitive intelligence that happens to be about people.
Competitor talent mapping is structured research into how rival organisations are staffed — their leadership, team structures, headcount distribution, talent concentrations and hiring activity — built entirely from publicly available information and open primary research. It shows where capability sits in your market and how your organisation compares.
The UK has a strong statutory disclosure regime, and it is legitimate research material. Companies House filings give confirmed directorships, appointment and resignation dates, group structures and, for larger entities, employee numbers and directors' remuneration. The FCA Financial Services Register confirms who holds regulated senior management functions, and when they were approved. Sector regulators maintain equivalent registers. Annual reports and remuneration reports disclose executive pay structures for listed companies. Gender pay gap reporting is a public statutory filing for larger UK employers.
None of this is secret, all of it is verifiable, and used properly it produces a far more reliable picture than a database export ever will.
Where the boundary sits. This work uses publicly available information and primary research conducted openly — published sources, statutory registers, company disclosures, professional networks, and direct conversations in which our researchers identify themselves and explain the nature of the research.
We do not obtain confidential internal documents, HR records, internal salary files or client data. We do not misrepresent who we are or who we work for. We do not ask people to disclose information they are contractually bound to protect. Personal data is processed in line with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and research subjects are told what the research is for.
A competitor talent map is an assembled, verified picture of what is observable. That is the entire product — and it is more than sufficient, because almost nobody assembles it properly.
Executive talent mapping is the research and profiling of senior leadership populations — C-suite, board, and the director and VP layer beneath — to establish who could credibly perform a specific senior role, how they are placed today, and how reachable they genuinely are. It is typically commissioned before an executive search begins, or instead of one.
The populations are small enough that every profile matters. A market of three hundred qualified candidates can be handled statistically. A UK market of nineteen credible candidates for a specialist leadership role cannot — the client will make a decision about a named individual on the strength of one profile, so every profile has to be right.
UK mobility constraints are unusually material. UK senior contracts commonly carry three to six month notice periods, and twelve months at board level. Garden leave is standard. Deferred compensation — LTIPs, deferred bonus, unvested share awards — creates a real financial cost to moving that has to be quantified rather than assumed. In FCA-regulated firms, a Senior Manager Function appointment requires regulatory approval before the individual can start, which can add months to an already long timeline. Restrictive covenants, while narrowly enforced by UK courts, still shape what a candidate can do immediately on joining.
The practical consequence: a UK executive map that reports availability without reporting these constraints is not decision-grade. A candidate who is interested, appointable and eighteen months from being able to start is a different proposition from one who can move in three — and the map has to say which is which.
The research is more sensitive. Senior UK mapping is frequently confidential — the incumbent may not know the role is being examined, and a small market must not learn that it is. Research at this level is conducted without revealing the client and without signalling to the market that a leadership change is coming.
Where a UK leadership change must not become public, executive mapping gives a board the complete external picture without a single approach being made, and without a search firm briefing the market that a role exists. If the decision is then taken to move, the map becomes the search. If it is not, nothing has leaked.
Where a decision has already been made to appoint, see our Executive Search service — delivered on the same project-fee basis, with market mapping as the foundation of every search.
Leadership talent mapping identifies and profiles the leadership population across a defined market — including the emerging leaders below the current top team — to support succession planning, leadership hiring and organisational design. Executive mapping asks who could take this seat; leadership mapping asks what does leadership look like across this market, and where does ours sit within it.
Talent intelligence is the gathering, verification and analysis of data about a talent market — the people, competitors, skills, rewards and locations that shape it — turned into insight a leadership team can act on. Where a talent map is a point-in-time study, talent intelligence is designed to stay current and be refreshed on an agreed cadence.
Talent mapping and talent intelligence are not competing services: mapping is the research engine, intelligence is the ongoing analytical layer built on top of it.
Six research disciplines feed one output, and each is weak on its own:
Salary data without population data tells you what the market pays but not whether anyone is available. Population data without structural data tells you who exists but not why they will or will not move. The value is in the combination, which is why Audentia builds them together rather than selling them as separate reports.
Audentia delivers talent intelligence as a service in its own right — see Talent Intelligence for the full offering, including refresh cadence, sample deliverables and case studies.
A talent intelligence consultancy conducts bespoke research into talent markets and converts it into decision support for senior leadership — rather than supplying candidates for a fee. The output is analysis and recommendation, and the engagement is scoped and priced as a research project.
Internal recruitment teams are good at finding people who want a job. They are structurally poor at mapping markets, for four reasons that have nothing to do with capability.
Audentia's model removes one further conflict that applies to agencies and search firms: because we are paid for research and never for a placement, we have no financial reason to conclude that a market can support a plan when it cannot.
Talent research services provide verified, structured data on defined talent populations, produced to a client's specification by trained researchers. UK executive search firms, in-house talent teams and RPOs commission talent research as embedded capacity; corporate clients commission it as the input to a hiring or planning decision.
Our full research philosophy, engagement model and quality principles are set out on Our Approach.
Talent pipelining is the process of engaging and maintaining relationships with identified candidates before a role becomes live, so qualified people are already known and interested when hiring begins. A talent map identifies the population; pipelining keeps the relevant part of it warm.
A finished UK talent map contains far more people than any hiring plan needs immediately. Pipelining takes the segment that matters, makes contact, establishes interest and context, and keeps that relationship current. The map tells you who to talk to; the pipeline is the talking. Neither works well alone — a pipeline without a map is a list of whoever answered, and a map without a pipeline is potential energy.
Talent data ages quickly — people move, are promoted, change scope. A pipeline that is not refreshed becomes a list of former facts. Audentia refreshes pipelines on an agreed cadence, and because you own the data outright, you can maintain it in-house instead if you prefer.
See Talent Pipelining for the standalone service, including engagement approach and refresh cadence.
Talent acquisition intelligence is market evidence applied directly to hiring execution — supply, competition, cost, location and difficulty for the specific roles being recruited. It makes recruitment decisions evidence-based at the point of delivery rather than only at the point of strategy.
Applied to a live UK hiring plan, it establishes:
That last point is where UK hiring plans most often fail. Time-to-hire targets tend to be set from internal averages rather than from the market being hired from — and a target set against a pool of forty people, half of whom are on six months' notice, behaves nothing like one set against a pool of four hundred.
For UK labour market context, ONS labour market statistics and the CIPD Resourcing and Talent Planning survey are the authoritative public sources. Our reporting gives you researched figures for your specific defined market, which is the level at which decisions are made.
Recruitment market intelligence is analysis of the conditions a hiring effort is operating in — talent demand, talent supply, competitor hiring, workforce trends, skills availability, locations and organisational structures — used to shape recruitment strategy rather than to fill a single role.
How this differs from traditional recruitment. Traditional recruitment responds to a vacancy: the role exists and the job is to fill it. Recruitment market intelligence operates before that point and asks whether the market can support the plan at all — and when the answer is no, that conclusion gets delivered rather than buried. One is execution; the other is the analysis that should precede it. Most UK organisations buy plenty of the first and almost none of the second.
Workforce intelligence is analysis of how workforces — your own and your competitors' — are composed, structured, distributed and skilled, used to inform workforce planning, organisational design and expansion decisions. Its unit of analysis is the workforce, not the vacancy.
Workforce intelligence is what a UK Chief People Officer needs when the question is not "who should we hire" but "can this plan be staffed at all".
Our process runs in eleven steps. The first four decide the value of everything after them.
We start with the decision, not the role. Sizing a market, planning a leadership hire, choosing a UK location, testing a headcount plan, benchmarking competitors — different objectives produce different maps of the same market.
The boundary is agreed explicitly and documented before research begins: functions, seniority bands, sectors, UK geographies, and which adjacent pools are in or out. Scope becomes a shared decision rather than a later disagreement.
We build the target list from the market definition, then test it. Every list starts incomplete, and the organisations added during research are frequently the most valuable.
What actually qualifies someone for inclusion — scope, experience markers, evidenced capability — expressed precisely enough that two researchers would make the same call.
Systematic, organisation-by-organisation coverage by researchers who specialise in that function and UK market, using publicly available sources and open primary research.
Individuals identified against the agreed criteria, with completeness against scope as the objective rather than volume.
Every profile checked; titles normalised against actual scope; career history, structural position and capability signals recorded consistently. Anything unconfirmed is flagged as unconfirmed.
Density by employer and location, movement patterns, structural comparison, and availability assessment including UK notice and compensation constraints.
Data organised into the agreed segmentation — ready-now, developmental, watch-list, unlikely to move — so the output is analysable rather than a flat list.
What the data actually shows: where the depth is, where the plan is exposed, which organisations to target, who is genuinely reachable, and what the map says that the original assumption did not.
A briefing with the people making the decision, plus the complete dataset and analysis handed over permanently — yours, in your format, with no ongoing dependency on us.
Book a 30-minute discovery callWe will tell you honestly whether mapping is the right tool for your decision.
Talk to Audentia About Talent MappingThe table below shows the data points in a standard Audentia talent map. All of it is researched from publicly available sources and open primary research.
| Information | What it shows | How it can be used |
|---|---|---|
| Name | A specific, relevant professional in the defined market | Turns an abstract market into people you can actually approach |
| Current employer | Where they work today | Reveals which UK organisations hold the capability |
| Current role | Their position, normalised against real scope | Makes people comparable across differently-titled employers |
| Function | The discipline they work in | Enables function-level supply analysis |
| Seniority | Their level and position in the hierarchy | Establishes whether the population is genuinely appointable to your role |
| Location | City, region and realistic hybrid catchment | Underpins UK location strategy and relocation assumptions |
| Tenure | Time in role and with the employer | The strongest single indicator of likely mobility |
| Career history | Previous organisations and progression | Reveals the routes people take into these roles |
| Skills | Technical and functional capability evidenced in public record | Tests whether the specific skill set exists at the volume assumed |
| Industry experience | Sectors worked in | Identifies transferable pools beyond the obvious competitor set |
| Reporting line | Who they report to and who reports to them | Shows what they actually run, not what their title implies |
| Organisational position | Where they sit in the structure around them | Distinguishes a genuine functional head from a senior individual contributor |
| Reward information (where scoped) | Researched salary and total reward context for the band | Tests whether your offer is competitive before you make one |
| Talent pool category | Ready-now, developmental, watch-list, unlikely to move | Turns the map into a prioritised action list |
Contact details for mapped individuals can be gathered as a separate step through our Number Gathering service, handled in line with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Where a project also scopes workforce composition or diversity benchmarking of the mapped population, see Diversity Hiring.
| Talent mapping | Recruitment | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Understand a market | Fill a role |
| Timing | Before a vacancy exists | After a vacancy exists |
| Research | Systematic coverage of the whole defined market | Enough candidates to produce a shortlist |
| Candidate coverage | Everyone relevant, including those not looking | Those who are available and responsive now |
| Strategic value | Informs headcount, structure, location and hiring strategy | Delivers a hire |
| Outputs | Structured map, competitor structures, analysis, recommendations | An appointment |
| Shelf life | Long — the asset keeps working | Ends with the vacancy |
| Commercial model | Fixed project fee | Typically a percentage of salary on placement |
| Typical use cases | Market entry, workforce planning, succession, benchmarking, pipeline building | Filling live, well-defined roles |
The two are complementary, not alternatives. Mapping tells you whether the plan is deliverable and who is in the market; recruitment executes against it. Problems arise when an organisation buys only the second and assumes it delivers the first. For vetted shortlists without agency placement fees, see Talent Sourcing.
| Executive talent mapping | Executive search | |
|---|---|---|
| Market research | The entire credible field for the role | The field relevant to filling this one seat |
| Candidate identification | Everyone who could do it, whether reachable or not | Those worth approaching for this mandate |
| Candidate engagement | Research contact only; no representation of a live role | Direct approach and representation of the opportunity |
| Assessment | Capability signals from evidence, not interview | Formal assessment, interviewing, referencing |
| Hiring | No appointment is made | An appointment is the objective |
| Relationship | Research project with a defined scope | A mandate, usually retained, usually exclusive |
| Deliverables | Map, structural analysis, availability assessment, recommendations | A shortlist, a process, and a hire |
| Commercial model | Fixed project fee | Retainer, or percentage of salary |
| Use it when | You need to understand the field before committing, or the change must stay confidential | You have decided to hire and need the appointment made |
Many UK organisations map first and then decide whether a search is needed. The map frequently changes the brief — and occasionally shows the strongest candidate is already inside the business. Audentia delivers both, which is why the recommendation about which you need can be given without a commercial motive attached. See Executive Search.
The terms are used loosely across the industry, which creates real confusion in procurement. Here is the distinction as we use it.
Talent mapping identifies the people in a market. Market mapping analyses the market itself. A talent map produces a named, profiled population. A market map produces a picture of size, structure, cost and accessibility. Most substantial projects need both, and the market view usually has to come first.
| Term | Unit of analysis | Core question | Primary output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Talent mapping | Individual people | Who exactly could do this, and where are they? | Named, profiled and segmented population |
| Talent market mapping | A talent market | How deep, accessible and expensive is this market? | Market sizing, structure, density and cost analysis |
| Recruitment market mapping | A hiring market | What conditions are we recruiting into? | Supply, demand, competitor hiring and difficulty assessment |
| Market intelligence | A commercial market | What is happening in this market and why? | Trend and dynamics analysis, of which talent is one component |
| Competitor intelligence | Rival organisations | How are our competitors built and what are they doing? | Structural, capability and activity analysis of named competitors |
In short: market mapping sits above talent mapping. Market mapping tells you whether the plan is viable; talent mapping tells you who to call. Competitor intelligence explains the behaviour of the organisations appearing in both.
A practical warning. If a provider offers "market mapping" and delivers a list of names, or offers "talent mapping" and delivers a market summary with no people in it, you are getting one and paying for the other. Agree the deliverable in writing before the project starts.
For organisational design, structural benchmarking against peers, and understanding how the UK market has built the function they are trying to build.
For succession planning, leadership benchmarking, and testing whether a people strategy is deliverable in the market it depends on.
For workforce planning evidence and reward benchmarking grounded in researched data rather than survey averages.
The largest single group. To plan hiring rather than react to it, justify headcount and location decisions with evidence, and build pipelines for roles they know are coming.
As embedded research capacity for live mandates without adding permanent headcount, and as the foundation research beneath a search.
For research capability at volume, specialist markets their own teams do not cover, and out-of-hours coverage across time zones.
In diligence, to assess whether a target's management team is as strong as the deck implies and whether the UK market can supply the leadership the value-creation plan requires. Post-deal, to map replacements quickly.
To support portfolio companies hiring their first senior commercial, engineering or finance leaders, where one wrong hire is a material event.
To validate that a plan is deliverable before budget is committed, and to identify which parts carry the most talent risk.
For competitor structural intelligence that is useful well beyond the HR function.
Companies entering or growing in the UK with no internal knowledge of the market, where every assumption needs testing before money is spent.
For confidential external benchmarking of the executive team, and for succession assurance without signalling anything to the market.
The pattern is consistent: mapping is worth commissioning when a decision is about to be made that would be expensive to reverse.
Most hiring decisions are made against the small, self-selecting group who applied. A map replaces that with the entire relevant UK population, including the people who would never have applied — which is usually where the strongest candidates are.
Specifications, timelines and offers built on researched market data rather than internal assumption or a survey average.
Because you own the data permanently, the second, third and fourth hire from the same UK market cost a fraction of the first. Our published case studies include a financial services client that replaced contingency search with research-led mapping and reported £390,650 saved against search-firm fees across a single year of hiring.
See our case studies →A map is the raw material. Organisations that map hire from a known population; those that do not start from zero every time.
Seeing the complete credible field before a search begins changes the brief, the shortlist and sometimes the decision itself.
Plans tested against supply before budget is committed rather than after.
Structural and hiring intelligence about the organisations you compete with — valuable to strategy teams as well as to HR.
The benefit that underwrites all the others: hiring stops being a response to vacancies and becomes the execution of a plan.
The UK is one of the most researchable talent markets in the world and one of the most frequently mis-mapped — because its concentration patterns are strong, its title conventions are inconsistent, and its mobility constraints are unusually heavy.
London's gravity is real but function-specific. For financial services, insurance, asset management, professional services, media, legal and much of enterprise technology, senior populations are genuinely London-weighted. For life sciences, aerospace, defence, energy, advanced manufacturing and industrial engineering, they are emphatically not. The most common failure in UK talent mapping is applying one assumption to both — either mapping only London and missing most of a distributed market, or mapping the whole country and diluting a genuinely London-centred one.
The commuter belt and hybrid catchment now matter more than the postcode. A significant proportion of UK senior professionals work for London employers from the Home Counties, the South Coast, the Midlands and further. Mapping by registered office undercounts the population available to a London role. We map by actual working location and realistic hybrid reach.
Each behaves like its own market with its own employers, mobility patterns and reward levels — not like a smaller London.
Certain UK organisations act as consistent net exporters of leadership talent into specific sectors — the large professional services firms, particular banks and insurers, several FTSE corporates that reliably produce operators. Identifying those routes tells you where to look for the layer beneath the top job, which is where most appointable candidates sit.
UK leadership hiring is also constrained in ways that need to be in the map rather than discovered later. Notice periods of three to six months are standard and twelve months is common at board level. Garden leave is routine. Deferred compensation creates a quantifiable cost to moving. In FCA-regulated firms, Senior Manager Function appointments require regulatory approval before a start date can be set. An availability assessment that ignores this is not decision-grade.
The UK's statutory disclosure regime makes competitor research unusually productive. Companies House confirms directorships, appointment dates and group structures. The FCA register confirms regulated senior appointments. Annual and remuneration reports disclose executive pay structures for listed companies. Gender pay gap reporting is a public filing for larger employers. Used systematically, these produce a verified structural picture that no database can match.
For overseas businesses entering the UK, the decisions that matter are which market to build in, what the first leadership hires should be, and whether the plan's assumptions about availability and cost survive contact with evidence. Those are mapping questions, and they are cheapest to answer before the entity is incorporated and the office signed.
For UK businesses expanding regionally, mapping compares candidate locations on supply, cost and competitive intensity — which frequently produces a different answer from the one property economics suggest.
For UK labour market context, use ONS labour market statistics and the CIPD Resourcing and Talent Planning survey. Our research supplies the population-level detail public data cannot: named individuals, competitor structures and validated reward for your specific market.
Audentia Research has an office in London and is registered in the UK. UK projects are delivered by researchers who specialise in the relevant function and market. Read more about us.
Our researchers specialise by function and geography across the sectors on our Sectors page. How mapping applies in each UK context:
Cloud, AI, cybersecurity, SaaS and semiconductors. The UK population is genuinely distributed across London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol and Cambridge, and hybrid working has widened every catchment. Title inflation in scale-ups makes normalisation essential.
Banking, insurance, asset management and fintech. Heavily London-weighted at senior level, with major operational centres in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester and Bournemouth. The FCA register and Senior Manager Regime make this the most researchable and the most mobility-constrained UK sector.
Pharma, biotech and medical devices, concentrated in the Cambridge–Oxford corridor with clusters around Manchester, Nottingham and Scotland. Small, interconnected markets where confidentiality is genuinely difficult.
Providers, payers and health-tech, spanning NHS, independent and technology employers with very different structures and reward frameworks.
FMCG, retail, e-commerce and hospitality, with head-office populations in London and the South East and substantial operational leadership across the regions.
Advanced manufacturing, automotive, aerospace and chemicals. Distributed across the Midlands, the North West and the South West, with strongly site-anchored leadership.
Renewables, oil and gas, power and utilities, with specialised populations in Aberdeen, the North East and around major infrastructure projects.
Consulting, legal and advisory. London-centred with strong regional offices, and a graded title structure that must be normalised before comparison.
PE, VC and portfolio companies, overwhelmingly London-based at fund level with portfolio leadership distributed nationally.
Operators, infrastructure and connectivity, with engineering and network leadership distributed around major network hubs.
Broadcast, publishing, gaming and streaming, with London and Manchester as the principal centres.
Government, education and charities, with published structures and pay frameworks that make mapping unusually straightforward.
A European industrial technology group plans to establish a UK operation. It needs a Managing Director, a Commercial Director and a Head of Engineering. Internally the assumption is London. The board wants to know whether that assumption is right before committing to premises, and whether the leadership team can realistically be hired within nine months.
UK-based leadership in industrial technology and advanced manufacturing businesses of comparable scale, with experience of establishing or scaling a UK operation for an overseas parent. Four markets compared: London and the South East, the Midlands, the North West, and Bristol and the South West.
Managing Director, General Manager and Country Manager populations; Commercial and Sales Director populations; Engineering leadership at Head of and Director level. Sectors defined as industrial technology, advanced manufacturing, automation and adjacent engineering. Explicitly excluded: pure software businesses, on the basis that the operational context does not transfer.
Around 60 target organisations across three groups — direct competitors, adjacent industrial technology businesses, and UK subsidiaries of overseas industrial groups. The third group produced the most useful population, because those leaders had already done exactly what the client needed doing.
The named population in each segment, profiled by employer, role, function, seniority, location, tenure, career history, reporting line and evidenced capability. Each individual flagged for realistic mobility based on tenure, recent structural change and public career trajectory — and, for the senior population, an assessed notice period and deferred compensation consideration.
Talent density by region and employer; how comparable businesses structure a UK leadership team, including whether the MD role exists at all at this stage; reward benchmarks by region and level; movement patterns between the target organisations; and a realistic time-to-hire assessment incorporating notice periods.
A structured map of the named population with full profiles; a four-region comparison on supply, cost and competitive intensity; competitor structure analysis; a reward benchmark by region and level; and a written recommendation with a prioritised approach list. Delivered as a working dataset plus a leadership briefing, handed over in full.
The map showed the relevant leadership population was materially deeper in the Midlands and the North West than in London, that London reward for the profile ran well above the business plan, and that comparable overseas parents typically hired a Commercial Director first and added the MD layer twelve to eighteen months later. It also showed that with three- to six-month notice periods across the target population, a nine-month timeline for three sequential hires was not achievable. The group changed the plan: a Midlands base, a Commercial Director hire first, the MD role deferred, and a twelve-month hiring timeline. The map became the pipeline for all three roles.
Deliverables are agreed before work begins and scoped to the project. Depending on scope, a UK engagement may include:
Everything is yours. Every record, contact, benchmark and insight is handed over in full and stays with your business. Nothing is retained in a proprietary database you must pay to access again, and you can make as many hires from the map as you like at no additional cost.
Every project is billed by scope as a fixed fee — never commission, never a percentage of salary. This is the structural difference, and everything else follows from it. We have no financial reason to recommend a hire, steer you toward a candidate, or conclude that a market can support a plan when it cannot.
Search firms cannot approach candidates they have placed elsewhere, and cannot research organisations they are contracted to serve. We have no placements to protect, so the map covers the UK market rather than the part of it we are permitted to look at.
Every record belongs to you, permanently. Nothing is locked in a tool we control. Hire from the map indefinitely, hand it to another provider, or maintain it yourself.
Primary research conducted openly, secondary research across published and statutory UK sources, triangulation of every material finding, and explicit flagging of anything unconfirmed.
Researchers specialise by discipline and market rather than working as generalists — which is what makes structural and reward findings reliable at senior level. ISO 9001:2015 certified research process.
An office in London and registered in the UK, with offices in New York, Toronto, Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai. Researching since 2012, across 70+ markets, with out-of-hours coverage built into the operating model.
Evidence from our own work. Our published case studies include a financial services client that reported £390,650 saved against search-firm fees in a year after replacing contingency search with research-led mapping, and a global AI engineering mapping project covering 4,200 candidates across six hubs.
The global service page — full methodology, comparison frameworks and deliverables across all markets.
View service →Metro-by-metro US mapping, title normalisation and equity-driven mobility. For transatlantic hiring plans.
View US page →Ongoing, refreshable market insight — competitors, skills, reward benchmarks, locations and diversity.
View service →Pre-engaged candidates ready before the need is urgent, refreshed on an agreed cadence.
View service →Senior and specialist hires handled with discretion — with market mapping as the foundation of every search.
View service →Vetted shortlists without agency placement fees, for roles that are live now.
View service →Real projects and real outcomes across mapping, search, pipelining and intelligence.
See the work →How we work: discovery, bespoke proposal, research and delivery, and full handover.
Read more →The industries we research, from technology and financial services to life sciences and energy.
Browse sectors →Ten research services. One research-first firm, billed by project and never commission.
View all →Articles, white papers and reports from our global research desk.
Read insights →A talent acquisition and intelligence consultancy, researching since 2012 across 70+ markets.
About us →A thirty-minute conversation is usually enough to establish whether talent mapping is the right tool for the decision in front of you, and what the right scope would be. If it is not, we will tell you.