Founder and publication director, MLJ, SASU
Jimenez Julien
I build ShortlistLoop for the two person search firm that wins on judgment and loses on reporting. If you send us a demo request, the reply comes from me.
Contact: jimenezjulien42@gmail.com
Why I built a shortlist page instead of another ATS
The first search firm I sat with had eleven years of placements behind it and a filing habit that would have embarrassed a law office. What they did not have was a way to show a client what was happening between Monday and Friday. Their tracker was excellent at recording history and useless at communicating it. Everything the client actually needed lived in the recruiter's head, and it only came out in a Friday email that took forty minutes to write and about nine seconds to skim.
I watched a director level search go sideways because a hiring manager took eight days to say the words that would have taken eight seconds on a page. The candidate accepted somewhere else on day six. The recruiter had done nothing wrong: she found the person, she wrote a sharp submittal note, she pushed twice. The loop between her work and the client's decision was simply too slow, and no amount of sourcing skill fixes a slow loop.
So ShortlistLoop is not an applicant tracking system and it does not try to be. Your tracker keeps the record. This keeps the conversation. One private page per search, showing the slate, the stage of every candidate, your written case for each one, and a place for the client to answer without opening a new tab or remembering a password. That is the whole product, and I have said no to a long list of adjacent features to keep it that way.
What working with search firms taught me
Boutique recruiters do not want software that asks them to change how they work. They want the four or five moves they already make to become visible to the person paying the fee. That distinction shapes almost every design decision in the product. Stage names are yours, not ours. Submittal notes are free text because your judgment does not fit in a dropdown. The client page is deliberately plain, because a hiring manager on a phone between meetings will not learn an interface.
I also learned that the small firm's real competitor is not the big agency down the road. It is the client's own indecision. Every extra day a slate sits unread is a day a finalist gets a call from someone else. So the product is measured on one thing above all: how fast the first written comment arrives after a submittal. When that number improves, everything downstream improves with it, and the recruiter looks like the sharpest vendor in the client's building.
The last lesson was about trust. Recruiters guard their candidate lists for good reason. So client contacts never see anything except the searches they were invited to, internal notes stay internal, and there is nothing in the business model that would tempt us to touch your data. We sell a flat monthly subscription. That is the entire revenue line.
Experience and expertise
- Founder of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes ShortlistLoop and operates it as a live commercial product.
- Fifteen years building and shipping web products, the last several focused on small operator software rather than enterprise platforms.
- Hundreds of hours of discovery calls and shadowing sessions with owners of one to six person recruiting and search businesses in the United States.
- Hands on work with the day to day tooling of the trade: applicant tracking systems, sourcing platforms, scheduling tools and the spreadsheets that quietly hold everything together.
- Responsible for product direction, written content, pricing, support replies and the accuracy of every claim published on this site.
How this product is built and maintained
ShortlistLoop is developed in short cycles with a small number of firms who agreed to be honest with me. Nothing ships because it demos well. A change ships when a recruiter on a live search says it removed a step or removed a doubt. When two firms disagree about a feature, the tie breaker is whichever option keeps the client page simpler for the hiring manager, because the hiring manager is the person least invested in learning anything new.
Editorially, every number on this site is one I can source. The medians and percentages published on the home page come from aggregated, anonymized usage across searches run on the platform during 2025, and they are recalculated rather than rounded upward. Testimonials are given by named people at named firms, published with their permission and quoted as written. If a claim stops being true, it comes off the page rather than getting softened.
Support is not a queue with a ticket number attached. Requests from this site arrive in a mailbox I read, and the standard I hold myself to is a written reply inside one business day. Product bugs that block a live search get looked at the same day, because a broken client page in the middle of an active slate is not something that can wait for a sprint boundary.
Published articles
Everything I have written so far for The Search Desk, the ShortlistLoop magazine covering the craft and the economics of boutique search in the United States.
- How to Write a Contingency Fee Agreement That Holds Up in a Fee Dispute
- Retained, Engaged, and Contingency Search: How Each One Pays
- Eight Submission Mistakes That Cost Recruiters the Placement Fee
- State Pay Transparency Laws and the Job Ads a Search Firm Posts
- A Retained Controller Search, Week by Week From Intake to Offer
- Where Fractional and Interim Placements Fit in a Search Firm's Revenue
- The Client Intake Call Checklist: 21 Questions Before Sourcing
- Desk Math for a Two Person Search Firm: Break Even and Cash Cycle
- The Offer Window: What Happens Between Verbal Yes and Signed Paper
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with the role you are working and the way you update the client today. If you would rather show me than describe it, use the demo request form and pick a time. I will bring nothing but questions and we will build a page for one of your live searches on the call.
You can also find me on X, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, and at jimenezjulien.com, where the rest of the MLJ catalog lives.