Bespoke Partners Launches AI-Powered Talent Mapping Platform

June 24, 2025 – San Diego, CA-headquartered Bespoke Partners has launched Calibrator, a scorecarding application accelerating executive search with an AI-powered talent market mapping platform for software and SaaS. Calibrator lets Bespoke’s clients to instantly see the complete talent pool for a given position based on adjustable scorecard parameters. “An executive hiring decision can impact billions of dollars in value creation for a private equity firm,” said Eric Walczykowski, CEO of Bespoke. “Leveraging AI, Calibrator empowers our clients to see and analyze the complete talent market for any executive need, making the right hiring decisions faster with this exclusive information.”

Calibrator is built on the foundation of the Executive Index – a talent market mapping platform for software executives. The Index uses AI-enhanced analytics to parse 53 million rows of executive background data from more than 575,000 sources, providing the first top-down market visibility of its kind. It provides a comprehensive view of the entire talent market of executives in software and SaaS in the United States, totaling nearly 700,000 executives. The application enables candidates to be filtered and prioritized dynamically based on factors including positions held, end-market experience, company growth accomplishments, geography and a variety of highly nuanced criteria.

“Unlike self-reported profiles on LinkedIn, the Executive Index presents validated backgrounds on executives, using AI to cross-reference hundreds of thousands of data sources,” said Mr. Walczykowski. “Now you have true visibility into how executives performed in prior roles and in-depth understanding of their potential to lead your company.”

Benefits of Calibrator and the Executive Index include: Complete, top-down view of the talent market, providing on average 50 percent larger talent pools compared to haphazard, bottom-up candidate discovery that other firms use. Cutting two or more weeks from a typical search process. Reducing time to build a 100-candidate pool for a search by 44 percent. Automating identification of backchannel reference contacts. Identifying candidates based on flight times from specific airports. It also offers a 90 percent accuracy rate, meaning the vast majority of candidates surfaced by the Index are scorecard matches.

Recently Launched

In February, the firm released Bespoke Executive Index. “Today we are reinventing executive search,” said Mr. Walczykowski. “The Bespoke Executive Index is the authoritative source of data on the accomplishments and experience of the full software and SaaS executive market. If you are conducting a search without the Executive Index, you are accessing only a fraction of the talent market you should be. This tech-enabled services foundation is another way that Bespoke is built different and why a search with Bespoke is like nothing else in the industry.”

Related: Redefining Talent Management for the Modern Age

Unlike self-reported executive profiles on LinkedIn and other platforms, the Executive Index leverages AI and hundreds of data sources to map executives and verify their backgrounds for accuracy. The Executive Index took three years of research, planning and development and more than a year of testing and validation by the Bespoke executive recruiting and research team.

The Executive Index’s impact and scope include:

• Mapping and validating the detailed backgrounds of nearly 700,000 software and SaaS executives in the United States. The Executive Index aggregates the output of hundreds of public and proprietary data sources and employs an advanced AI analytics engine to parse, verify and summarize executive track records.
• Providing verified details on executives’ track records in revenue growth, experience with private equity portfolio companies, exits achieved and other accomplishments. Executive Index details are automatically validated and verified using high-credibility third-party data sources and AI analytics.
• Cutting the average days-to-close of a Bespoke executive search by a projected 15 percent or more. Bespoke’s current days-to-close average is 90 days.
• Increasing the typical membership for a search by 50 percent when compared to traditional research methods of incrementally identifying candidates.
• Yielding a scorecard hit rate of 84 percent, nearly triple the accuracy of other common methods of candidate research. This means nearly all the candidates surfaced by the Executive Index based on a set of scorecard filters are a fit and worth pursuing for a given role.
• Offering a filtering interface to generate search scorecards in real-time, instantly showing how scorecard parameters affect membership size. Experience in a sector, in a role, geographic accessibility, travel times, company stages and many more parameters can be adjusted to automatically filter the talent pool.

Bespoke Partners is an executive search and leadership advisory firm dedicated to partnering with top private equity firms, including Francisco Partners, Clearlake Capital, WCAS, Insight Partners, GI Partners, General Atlantic, CVC Capital Partners, and TA Associates, among many others, to recruit software talent and assess and evaluate teams at every stage of the investment lifecycle, from growth equity to buyout. Bespoke Partners is headquartered in San Diego, and operates other regional offices in Austin, TX, and Philadelphia.

The search firm has completed over 1,000 searches since its inception a decade ago. Its expertise includes all C-level searches across multiple functional domains, including financial officers, HR and people, marketing and technology, as well as board of directors and internal private equity operating partner searches. The firm’s expanding leadership advisory platform includes organizational due diligence as well as executive assessment and coaching. Successful searches include CEOs, CFOs, CROs, CMOs, CPOs, CTOs, CIOs, CHROs, board members, operating partners, vice presidents and many more. Bespoke-placed executives have orchestrated exits and more than 425 acquisitions by their companies, generating more than $145 billion in value.

Related: How to Use AI to Stand Out to Executive Search Consultants

Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor  – Hunt Scanlon Media