Executive search
The shortlist your committee will actually open.
Totem is a confidential workspace for running a small number of high-stakes executive searches. Your committee reviews the slate through a single link — no account, no password, nothing to learn — and you can see exactly where consensus stands.
The problem
The people who decide never log in
Board members and hiring committees will not learn another system for one search a year. So the recruiter becomes the integration layer, hand-building status decks and chasing feedback by email.
The real record lives in Excel
Long-cycle, confidential, relationship-heavy work does not fit software built for moving hundreds of applicants through a funnel. So the truth migrates to spreadsheets, inboxes and slide decks — and the reasoning behind decisions is lost.
Consensus is invisible until it fails
Nobody can see that two members are quietly opposed until the decision is re-litigated in the room. By then the search has lost a month.
The Briefing Room
One link. No account. No training.
Every committee member gets their own expiring link to a room built for exactly one job: read the slate, score it, say yes or no. It opens on a phone between meetings. There is nothing to install, no password to reset, and no menu to learn.
You see who has opened it, who has scored, and where the committee is split — without sending another chasing email.
What leaves the workspace
The committee sees
- The summary you approved, in your words
- Career history and why you included them
- Their own scorecard and private note
The committee never sees
- Raw screen notes and your working drafts
- Compensation, unless you choose to share it
- Another member’s reasoning, or another search
This is enforced in the product, not by convention. A draft summary cannot reach a committee because the code that builds their view has no access to it.
Confidentiality
Codenames by default
A confidential search shows its codename — never the role title — in every email that leaves the system.
Links that expire
Committee access is single-use, time-boxed and revocable. No standing accounts to audit later.
A record of who saw what
Every view, release and decision is logged, so you can answer that question a year from now.
Your name on it
The room, the pack and the deck carry your firm's name and colour, not ours.
What Totem is not
- Not an applicant tracking system. It will not process three hundred applications a day, and it is not trying to.
- Not a replacement for Workday or your HRIS. That stays your system of record; Totem hands off to it.
- Not a sourcing tool or a database of scraped profiles.
- Not priced or built for volume hiring. A handful of searches, run properly.
Run your next search here.
Totem is in private beta. If you run executive searches — in-house or retained — and the committee is the hard part, I would like to show you this and hear where it is wrong.
Request a walkthrough