For desks running 2 to 8 open searches
Every search gets its own private page where the slate, the stage of each candidate and your submittal notes update the second you move a card. The hiring manager opens one link, leaves feedback under the profile it belongs to, and stops calling you on Tuesday to ask where things stand.
Set up on a live search in under an hour. No credit card to start a conversation.
01 Where the search actually stalls
Nobody leaves a boutique firm because the recruiter could not find people. They leave because five days went by without a straight answer.
At six o'clock you write four paragraphs summarizing a week the client half remembers already. It lands between a board deck and a vendor invoice, and by Monday it is scrolled past. You wrote it, they did not read it, and neither of you can point to what was decided.
About 2.9 hours a week per recruiter, roughly $7,800 a year of billable attention.Three profiles go out Tuesday. The reply arrives eight days later asking to talk about the second one. By then the second one has a verbal offer from a competitor who moved on Thursday, and you are back to sourcing a slate you had already closed.
One lost finalist per search is a $22,000 to $34,000 fee walking out the door.The hiring manager forwards your PDF to a peer, who replies to a different thread. Comp numbers live in a spreadsheet, notes live in the ATS, and the version the client is looking at is nine days old. Every submittal starts by rebuilding a document you have already built.
Around 40 minutes rebuilt per submittal, and one stale salary figure is enough to burn the account.Tuesday morning the phone rings and the question is always the same one. You stop mid sourcing, open two tabs and your notebook, and narrate for twelve minutes what a page could have shown in eleven seconds. Then you try to find the thread you dropped.
Two to four interruptions a week, about 25 minutes of lost focus each time.02 How a shortlist page works
You already do most of this. ShortlistLoop just puts it somewhere the client can read it without asking you first.
Name the role, pick the stages your desk actually uses, and add the client contacts who should have the link. Most firms set their stage rail once and reuse it on every search after that, so opening the next one takes about ninety seconds.
Paste a profile URL, drop a resume in, or pull the record straight from Bullhorn, Loxo, Crelate and JobAdder through the two way sync. ShortlistLoop builds the card, and you write the one paragraph that says why this person earned a slot on the slate.
The client opens a private page carrying your slate, each candidate's stage, your submittal note and the scorecard questions you agreed on during intake. There is no account to create, no attachment to lose and no version number to argue about.
Hiring managers rate, comment and mark advance or pass right on the card. Every response carries a name and a timestamp, so the debrief call starts from what people already wrote instead of from a blank page.
A shortlist page has one job: make the client's next decision obvious in under a minute.
ShortlistLoop product principle03 What sits inside the product
Six things a small firm needs on every search, and nothing built for an enterprise talent acquisition team.
Every candidate sits on a rail you name yourself, from sourced through offer and start date. Move a card on your side and the client page redraws itself, with the change stamped, dated and attributed.
Each profile carries the case you would make on a call: why this person, where the risk sits, what the comp expectation really is. The client reads your judgment first and the resume second, which is the order that moves a search.
Turn the intake conversation into four or five weighted questions and hang them under every card. Hiring managers rate on the page, and you can see at a glance who has answered, who has skimmed and who has not opened it yet.
You see when the page was opened, which profiles were expanded and how long each one held attention. That is the difference between guessing which candidate to push on Thursday and knowing the CFO spent four minutes on one card.
Post a short update when the market tells you something: comp is running twelve percent light, two passives declined for relocation, one referral is inbound. A client who reads context does not interpret a quiet week as a stalled search.
Offer extended, accepted, start date confirmed and the guarantee clock all sit on the same timeline as the search. If a placement wobbles inside the guarantee window, you find out from the page before you find out from a phone call.
04 What changes in the numbers
Measured across 1,180 searches run on ShortlistLoop by US firms during 2025.
Written feedback used to land 6.2 days after a submittal. On a shortlist page it arrives in 31 hours, because rating a candidate takes one tap in the two free minutes a hiring manager actually has.
Recap emails, slate decks and update calls add up fast on a small desk. Firms that logged their own time recovered an average of 3.1 hours a week once their second search moved onto a page.
When the submittal note sits beside the profile and the answer is one click, more of your slate gets a genuine read. Nineteen percent more submitted candidates reached a first interview than in the same firms' email run searches.
Decisions compound. Searches with a live page finished their first interview round about nine days earlier, mostly because the advance or pass call happened on the day the client read rather than the following week.
05 Firms running client pages today
Three owners, three very different desks, one habit dropped.
I carry four retained searches at a time and I used to give up Friday evening to write recaps. The page is the recap now. My last client opened it eleven times in a week and commented on every profile, which never once happened with a PDF.
The read signals changed how I run a debrief. I know the CFO spent four minutes on one profile and never opened the other two, so I lead with that candidate instead of walking the whole slate again while everyone checks their phone.
We are two people covering manufacturing roles across five states. The scorecard questions under each card get me a real reason for a pass instead of a shrug, and the second slate is sharper because of what the first one told us.
06 Plans and pricing
One flat monthly rate per firm. No fee per client, no charge per candidate, no annual lock.
One recruiter carrying up to three live searches at a time.
$39 per month
Two to five recruiters sharing a client roster and one stage set.
$99 per month
Six or more consultants, retained work, guarantees running across desks.
$199 per month
Billing, plainly. Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from your account settings. There is no setup fee, no minimum term and no charge for the client contacts you invite. If you cancel, your searches stay readable for 60 days so nothing is lost mid guarantee.
07 Questions from the first call
Straight answers. If yours is not here, put it in the form below and you will get a written reply.
An active search is one role with a live client page that you have not archived yet. Candidates, client contacts and feedback are unlimited inside every search, so the count is about roles and nothing else. When a role is filled or put on hold, archive it and the slot frees up for the next one. Archived searches stay readable for you and for your client, they simply stop counting toward the plan limit.
Most recruiters have their first search live in under an hour. You name your stages once, bring in the candidates you already have, and write a submittal note for each one. Firms moving a full desk usually finish in a single afternoon. If you would rather not type it twice, we will run the first import with you on a screen share at no charge.
Records are stored on US hosted infrastructure and encrypted in transit and at rest. Every client page is served from a private link that you can revoke in one click, and client contacts only ever see the searches you invite them to. They never see your other clients, your fee arrangements or anything you mark as an internal note. We do not sell your data, we do not train models on it, and you can export every field to CSV whenever you like.
Yes. On the Boutique and Search Firm plans, ShortlistLoop syncs candidate records both ways with Bullhorn, Loxo, Crelate and JobAdder, so a stage change made on the client page writes back to your tracker. If your firm runs on spreadsheets and a shared drive instead, a CSV import handles an entire slate in one paste. There is also an open API and a Zapier connection for the workflows nobody else has covered.
You cancel in account settings and billing stops at the end of the month you have already paid for. Nothing is deleted that day. Your searches, notes and captured feedback stay available in a read only window for 60 days so you can export them, and existing client pages keep working through that window, which matters when a placement is still inside its guarantee. Reopen the account later and everything is exactly where you left it.
There is nothing to install and no password to remember. They click the link in your email, the page opens, and every action is a single tap: advance, pass, or leave a comment under the profile. Across the firms running on ShortlistLoop, 94 percent of client contacts open the page within a day of the first send. The two or three holdouts who refuse to open anything still receive the same written digest you used to compose by hand.
08 Reporting from the desk
Long form reporting on how small firms write fee terms, run intake calls and get offers signed. Free to read, no sign up.
practical guide
The fee clauses that decide who gets paid when a placement goes sideways: ownership windows, guarantee terms, invoice triggers, backfills, and the language that keeps a boutique firm out of court.
comparison
Retainers, engaged searches with a partial deposit, and pure contingency all bill differently and carry different risk. Here is how the money actually moves in each one, and which roles justify which model.
mistakes to avoid
Most lost fees are not lost at the offer. They are lost the day a resume goes out without written acknowledgement, consent, or a clear source of introduction. Eight failure points and the paper trail that prevents each one.
09 Talk to us about a live search
We will build the shortlist page with you on the call, using your own candidates and your own stage names. If it looks right, you send the link to the client the same afternoon.
Prefer email? Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and describe the search in a paragraph.