Executives are sold to by four distinct kinds of business, and confusing them is the source of most disappointment in a senior search. The clearest way to tell them apart is to ask who pays.
Paid by the company. They are hired to fill a specific seat and their client is the employer, always. They are enormously useful to be known by and structurally unable to work for you — a partner with three live mandates has three problems, and your career is not one of them.
The right relationship is long, low-intensity and reciprocal: be findable, be helpful when they are hunting for someone else, and understand that they will contact you when your profile matches a brief they have been paid to fill.
Paid by the company, only on placement. Volume is the model, which makes them fast and broad and largely irrelevant at chief level, where roles are rarely filled this way.
Paid by you. Their alignment is genuinely with your interests, which is the significant advantage. Their limitation is the one described in the coaching article: they improve your performance, not your access.
Paid by you, and this is where the category gets muddy. Some sell access to a candidate database — which means the actual customer is the recruiter buying the list, and you are the inventory. Others sell you information and tools directly, and take no money from employers at all.
Ask any platform one question: do you make money from employers or recruiters? The answer determines whose interests the product serves when the two conflict.
Be known. Cannot be hired by you.
Buy clarity, narrative and discipline. Cannot buy access.
Buy visibility of what is happening and who you know. Cannot buy judgement.
Free, undermaintained, and the most powerful of the four.
None of these substitutes for another. The common failure is buying one and expecting it to cover all four jobs — most often buying coaching and expecting access, or buying a platform and expecting it to decide anything for you.
Coaching is genuinely valuable for a narrow set of problems and cannot solve the two most common ones. Knowing the difference before you buy saves months.
Read → Where Brinksignal fitsNot a job board, not a recruiter, not a coach. What the platform actually does, and the two jobs it exists to do.
Read → Where Brinksignal fitsThe refusals are the product. What we do not claim, do not sell and do not guess — and why each limit exists.
Read →A short call, your target list, and an honest answer about whether this fits how you are running your search.