The whole journey, written down.

Requesting access

Mandate is in closed beta with a hand-picked group of executive search firms. There is no self-serve signup: access is granted by approval, a founder reads every application, and nothing asks for a credit card — there is no trial tier to fall into.

The form

The request lives at /request-access. Six fields, and only the first two are required:

• Full name and email — required; the email is where your

invitation will eventually arrive.

• Company, role or title, how you heard about us, and what you are

trying to solve — all optional, all read by a person.

When the request lands you see Request received and a promise we keep by hand: we reply within 48 hours, and if we approve, a sign-up link arrives at the email you provided.

What happens behind it

• Submissions are rate-limited. If the limiter refuses you it says so

politely — "We've already received a request from you. We'll be in touch." — and your earlier request stands.

• Sending the same email twice does not create two requests, and the

form will not tell a stranger whether an address has applied.

• Your request enters a review queue that only Mandate's founder can

read. What happens next is the subject of the following chapter.

Approval, and the join link

Approval is a decision by a person, not a switch flipped by software. When the founder approves your request, the product provisions two things: a place for you to work, and a personal invitation to it.

What approval actually creates

• If your firm is new to Mandate, approval creates your organisation —

a private workspace no other firm can see — and issues you a staff invitation as its admin. You own your team from day one.

• If your firm already runs on Mandate, approval issues you an

invitation into the existing organisation at whatever role its situation calls for.

Either way, the artefact you receive is a single join link. The product emails nothing; the founder sends the link to you personally, at the address from your request.

The join contract

The invite is the approval. Opening the link shows you exactly what you are walking into: the organisation's name, who invited you, the role you will hold, and the email the seat is for. There is no separate "pending" state and no second review — nobody's account exists until they set their own password at the link.

• The link is personal and single-use, and it expires **fourteen

days** after issue.

• You choose a password (minimum length, mixed case, a digit and a

symbol), and clicking the link is itself what confirmed your email.

• The moment your password is set you are signed in, landing on your

desk — active, in your organisation, with your role already in place.

A dead link — expired, withdrawn, or already used — says only "This link no longer works" and tells you to ask for a fresh one. It deliberately does not reveal which kind of dead it is.

First sign-in

Signing in lands you on the Portfolio — the authenticated home. Everything in the product hangs off a left rail with four groups:

• Workspace — Portfolio, Desk (managers and admins), Analytics,

Objectives, Placements, Activity.

• Search — Clients, Mandates, Candidates (with Pool search),

Network.

• Intelligence — Executive Intelligence, with Competencies and

Role templates.

• System — Agents, Skills studio, and Settings (Members appears

for admins).

The Portfolio

Once your searches are running, the Portfolio shows your action queue, your tasks, four headline numbers — active mandates, candidates, added this week, and at-risk mandates flagged by the Search Health Agent (flagged for attention, never judged for you — decision support, never a recommendation) — and a table of active mandates with their status and health.

Before you have data: sample mode

A brand-new workspace has nothing in it, so the Portfolio opens in sample mode: an example account showing what Mandate looks like in use. Sample content is always labelled — a banner reading "Sample dashboard" states plainly that none of it is your data, and every sample screen carries a // sample data marker in its meta line. The moment your own first mandate exists, the real workspace takes over.

The Desk

Admins and managers also see Desk — desk oversight across every recruiter: load, pipeline, placements, open tasks, and mandate reassignment, all derived from the live rows. In its own words: nothing scored, nothing asserted.

The mandate loop

A search in Mandate runs as a loop: describe the role once, calibrate what matters, feed it candidates, and let ranked evidence accumulate until a slate is ready. Every agent output along the way is decision support — never a recommendation; you review, edit and approve at each step that matters.

Intake — one line

A new mandate starts at New mandate with a single line — "Head of IT Ops for RBC Capital Markets" is the whole input. On submit the Intake, Company Intelligence, Role Spec and Calibration agents activate, the mandate page opens immediately, and the title resolves from "Analyzing…" to the parsed role and company within seconds.

The onboarding wizard

Each mandate then carries a five-step questionnaire that turns your knowledge of the client into calibration:

1. Origin — where this mandate came from and why now.
2. Must-haves — non-negotiables, applied as hard filters.
3. Anti-patterns — deal-breakers you never want to see again.
4. Stakeholders — the interview panel and what each person probes.
5. Priorities — the role's priority signals, each with a weight.

Calibration

From the intake and the wizard, the Calibration Agent derives a scoring model across five dimensions — technical, domain, leadership, regulatory, transformation — each weighted 0–10 and shown with its rationale on the mandate page. There is no slider to drag: the levers are the wizard's answers, the Optimize screen, recalibration from feedback, and Calibration History, where every prior model can be inspected and restored.

CV upload

Candidates enter as documents: PDF or DOCX, 10 MB max, dropped onto CV Intake. The CV Parsing Agent extracts role history, scale, tech exposure and archetype in one pass — usually 20 to 40 seconds — into org-scoped private storage.

Evaluation

Each candidate page holds the parsed profile (every field editable), the evidence, and a fit reading weighted against the approved calibration. The page says it itself, verbatim: decision support — never a recommendation.

Ranking and the shortlist

The ranking leaderboard scores every parsed candidate against the calibration and sorts them into four tiers — Optimal, Strong, Stretch, Below Bar. From there you compare candidates side by side, generate the comparative market report (exportable as Markdown, HTML or PDF, with a client email draft), and build the slate: three, five, or a custom size, finalised with an explicit submission.

Feedback and recalibration

Feedback — yours or a hiring manager's — is interpreted for preference changes, contradictions and bias flags, and can recalibrate the scoring model. The loop closes: the next ranking pass reflects what the client actually said.

The weekly report

Each mandate has a Weekly Report: an executive summary, top candidates, and what was sourced this week, generated on demand and archived by week. It exports as Markdown or PDF and can open a pre-filled client email draft.

Sharing with a hiring manager

A hiring manager never needs an account, a password, or a login. The whole client-sharing contract is a link: the recruiter mints it, hands it over, and can kill it at any moment.

Minting a link

From a mandate's HM Portal tab you generate a link, optionally tied to a named client contact and labelled — one labelled link per person, so each can be revoked individually without disturbing the others. Naming a contact does not create an account; externals stay on the token path.

• Links expire thirty days after issue.
• Revocation is immediate and permanent — a revoked link cannot be

reactivated, only replaced.

• Nothing is emailed by the product. You copy the link and hand it

over yourself.

What the hiring manager sees

The link opens a read-only portal scoped to that one mandate: the role, the search status, when it last moved, and the current slate — each candidate with their fit reading, tier, rank and headline. The fit figures are weighted against the approved calibration and presented as decision support — never a recommendation; the slate is the search team's to argue, not the software's. Before a slate exists the portal says so honestly and shows the top-ranked candidates so far.

Feedback flows back

Under each candidate the hiring manager can rate — Strong Yes, Yes, Maybe, No — and write what stands out or concerns them, plus a slate-level note. Submitting sends every rating and note into the mandate's feedback record, where the Feedback Interpreter reads it for preference changes and contradictions and the search team calibrates against it.

A dead link tells the visitor to ask the recruiter for a fresh one, and portal opens are recorded on the mandate's activity trail.

The candidate portal, and erasure

Candidates have a door of their own. From a candidate's page the recruiter gets a portal link — one live link per person, thirty days, reissuing returns the same one — and hands it over. Nothing is emailed by the product.

What a candidate sees

The portal shows the person exactly what is held about them and lets them act on it:

• What is held — contact details, current title and company,

profile links, whether a CV is on file, and how they were found.

• The searches they are in — each live search by role title and

stage, with a Withdraw button per search. Withdrawing is visible to the search team, who stop considering them. The client behind a search stays confidential until the team introduces it.

• Correct your details — phone, location and profile links are

editable in place; the identity anchor (name or LinkedIn) and email changes go through the search team.

• Submit a newer CV — uploads go to the team for review by hand; a

new file never replaces the old one automatically.

Asking for erasure

The portal's last section lets a candidate ask the firm to erase what it holds about them, with an optional note. The contract is stated where the button lives: the request is reviewed by a person, erasure is not automatic, and the team may need to keep some records where the law requires it.

Once filed, the request is visible to the search firm's admin — whose screen says plainly to stop working the person — and to Mandate, where a founder reviews it and either declines or resolves it, recording a note of what was erased. Review and execution sit with a person at every step.

Member management

Admins run their own team from Settings → Members. Mandate's founder opens the front door; everything after that belongs to the organisation.

Inviting a colleague

Invitations work exactly like the door you came through: the admin names the person, picks their role, and receives a join link to hand over. Nothing is emailed. The link is single-use, expires in fourteen days, and whoever redeems it joins active, in the role chosen at issue — the invite is the approval. Open invitations are listed and can be revoked at any time; a revoked invitation cannot be reactivated.

The five staff roles

• Admin — everything a manager can do, plus org settings, member

roles and the skills studio.

• Manager — runs the desk: every recruiter's mandates, pipeline

and fees, and reassigns leads. Cannot administer members or author skills.

• Recruiter — runs mandates end to end: sourcing, evaluation,

shortlists, client exports and outreach.

• Researcher — sourcing and evaluation, with their own delivery

objectives. Cannot open a mandate, publish a shortlist or contact a candidate.

• Viewer — read-only across the org, excluding fees and revenue.

The members screen carries the full capability-by-role matrix, so what each role can touch is never a matter of memory. Client-side people (hiring managers, HR) are invited through their own separate door and never appear in this roster's role picker.

Suspending and restoring

An admin can suspend any member — their session stops working within one request, and nothing is deleted — and restore them later. Four refusals are built in, stated in words when you hit them:

• Founder accounts are managed by Mandate and cannot be changed here.
• Agent principals are managed from the operator console, not the

members screen.

• You cannot suspend your own account.
• The organisation's last active admin cannot be suspended — that

would lock the organisation.

The same last-admin protection applies to role changes: an organisation can never admin itself to zero.

What the agents do — and never do

Every agent judgment in Mandate runs as a principal: its own identity in the database, its own credential, its own kill switch, and its own name in the activity trail. No agent acts as you, and the editorial lines below are enforced in the database, not in a prompt. The full registry — every agent, its status, what it does and what stays human — is a page inside the product, at Agents.

The working set

Agents cover the loop in phases: understanding the role (intake, company intelligence, culture, calibration, role spec), discovering people (boolean search, candidate search and research), evaluating them (CV parsing, evaluation, ranking, triangulation, psychology, executive intelligence), engaging them (outreach strategy, relationship, engagement, pre-screen), delivering (positioning, shortlist, search health, desk digest), and assisting you (the feedback interpreter and Mandy, the copilot). Each registry entry states its one job and its "stays human" line.

The lines that hold

• Decision support — never a recommendation. Scores are weighted

evidence against your approved calibration; no agent output tells you whom to hire, and the interfaces are built so a reading cannot be mistaken for a verdict. The pre-screen conversation goes further: no verdict, no score, no pass — anywhere, by construction.

• No agent acts as you. Every agent write lands under the agent's

own name in the activity trail; your name is never borrowed.

• No agent contacts anyone on its own. Outreach drafts wait for a

person to send them; portal links are handed over by hand.

• Every agent can be stopped. Each principal has an independent

kill switch, and a suspended agent's work simply does not happen — the product says so rather than pretending.

• You steer them in writing. Agents read your Skills Studio

instructions on every run; steering lives with your team, not in a support ticket.

What the words on the screen mean

Where the product shows you example content before your own data exists, it says so — sample screens are labelled as sample, and marketing illustrations are labelled illustrative. Where an agent's reading appears, the sentence beside it is the doctrine of this whole handbook in six words: decision support, never a recommendation.