Executive Search CV Formatting and Candidate Reports

Executive search CV formatting carries more weight than it looks. In executive search, the CV is rarely the whole story, but it is the document a board or CEO reads first. It has to look like your firm, read cleanly, and be exactly right. A misdated directorship or an overstated title in a shortlist pack does more damage at this level than anywhere else, and discretion matters as much as presentation: many candidates are not on the market and would not thank you for an email address left in a footer.

CVPitch helps search firms produce consistent, source-checked candidate CVs quickly, so consultants and researchers spend their time on assessment and conversation rather than reformatting.

What makes executive submissions different

• Long careers. Twenty or thirty years of roles, board seats and advisory positions, often with overlapping dates.
• Titles that need precision. "Interim CFO", "Acting Managing Director" and "Non-executive Director" are not interchangeable, and qualifiers matter.
• Confidential candidates. Early in a search, clients may see an anonymous prospect profile before a name is released.
• Firm presentation. Your branding, a consistent structure across the shortlist, and sometimes a coversheet summarising the brief.
• Consultant notes kept separate. Your assessment is valuable, but it should never be confused with what the candidate wrote.

How CVPitch fits a retained search

1. Upload each shortlisted CV, singly or in bulk, up to 10 MiB and, for PDFs, 20 pages. Word and text PDFs work best; a scanned or photographed CV is read by OCR at 1 AI credit per page.
2. Check facts against the source. Every role, date, qualification and board position links to the passage it came from. Unsupported facts are marked unverified, and ambiguous date ranges are flagged.
3. Add your notes, clearly labelled. Anything a consultant adds, such as current package, notice period or relocation, is labelled recruiter-added. Client rules can make specific fields mandatory before approval.
4. Choose the privacy level. Remove email, phone, address and personal links, or use the anonymous prospect preset to replace the name with your candidate reference.
5. Approve and export. Approval is tied to the exact facts, template version and privacy settings. Export an editable Word file and a matching PDF in the client's format.

Anonymous prospect profiles, with honest limits

The anonymous prospect preset replaces the candidate's name with an agency reference and removes contact details from the generated DOCX, PDF and hidden document metadata. The original CV is stored separately and never overwritten.

Be clear with clients about what that achieves. At executive level, a career history is often identifying on its own: there may be only a handful of people who were CFO of a particular listed company in a given year. Contact removal is not anonymisation. To go further, mask employers and institutions with descriptors such as "FTSE 100 retailer" (type your own, or have AI suggest them for 1 AI credit per candidate), and remove date of birth, age and nationality lines. Dates and unusual titles may still need generalising by hand, and CVPitch labels those edits as recruiter changes. Our blind CV guide and the CV anonymisation glossary entry explain the difference.

Confirm details with the candidate privately

Before a profile goes to the client, you often need the candidate to confirm something: a leaving date, the scope of a role, a qualification year. CVPitch can create a private, expiring confirmation link that asks the candidate only the questions you choose. Their answers come back as proposals for you to review, labelled candidate-confirmed, rather than changing the CV automatically.

Build the pitch from evidence

Paste the position specification and CVPitch marks each requirement as evidenced, partly evidenced or not shown, with the CV passage beside it. The matching is deterministic rather than an AI judgement. It drafts an editable cover email citing that evidence, and a list of gaps to explore at interview. For board-level briefs with soft criteria, treat it as a structured starting point for your own assessment. See how to pitch a candidate to a client.

Share the shortlist and see responses

Send each approved CV to the client through a secure, expiring share link, or add the shortlist to one spotlight link, anonymised by default, where each candidate has a web profile. You see opens and downloads, and the client can choose Request interview, Maybe or Not a fit with a comment. Revoke a link the moment a candidate withdraws. Share pages are not indexed by search engines.

The same shortlist exports as a PowerPoint deck or an Excel sheet built only from approved CVs, named or anonymised, and the client engagement report shows how quickly each client opened what you sent. On the Agency plan, share pages can carry your firm's name and logo instead of CVPitch's and run on your own domain.

Data handling search firms ask about

• Access is limited to members of your workspace; tenant isolation is enforced by authenticated membership.
• Candidate text never goes to analytics, and chat notifications carry metadata only.
• You set retention from 1 to 90 days, and you can delete a submission at any time.
• AI extraction, OCR and the optional AI writing tools use Anthropic's Claude (Haiku), with cost caps on every request.
• Owners can require single sign-on through your identity provider and download the workspace audit log as a CSV file.

Read our security practices and the GDPR guide for agencies.

A shortlist pack in practice

For a typical retained search, a researcher uploads the shortlisted CVs in one batch and checks the extracted facts against each source. The consultant adds package and notice details as recruiter fields, resolves any flags on overlapping board roles, and chooses either named profiles or anonymous prospect profiles for the first client meeting. Each CV is approved in the client's variant, so the whole shortlist shares the same structure and branding. The consultant then shares the shortlist with the client in one spotlight link, and the client's Request interview, Maybe or Not a fit responses arrive in one place rather than scattered across email threads.

What CVPitch does not do

It will not write narrative assessments or generate psychometric or fit scores. Its PowerPoint shortlist deck summarises approved CVs; it is not an assessment report. Many search firms use CVPitch for the CV and the shortlist and keep their bespoke assessment report in Word, attaching both.

Related reading

See the full list of CVPitch features and integrations, how finance recruiters use CVPitch, and what a blind CV can and cannot achieve.

Frequently asked questions

Can CVPitch produce a candidate report rather than a CV?

It produces a formatted CV with an optional coversheet in your client's format, an evidence-cited pitch email, and shortlist decks and sheets. Narrative assessment reports are outside its scope; the exported Word file is editable if you want to add one.

Can we hide the candidate's name until the client is interested?

Yes. The anonymous prospect preset replaces the name with your candidate reference and removes contact details, and you can mask employers with descriptors too. Remember that a distinctive career history can still identify someone.

How do long executive CVs fit the limits?

PDFs can be up to 20 pages and 120,000 characters of text, which covers most executive CVs. Very long publication lists or portfolios may need trimming first.

Is there a per-consultant charge?

No. Every plan includes unlimited users; white-label share pages and a custom domain come with Agency. See pricing or start a free trial with 10 exports.