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Article / 18 December 2018

Market Mapping or Search: Which is right for your business?

At Chameleon International, we have two key service offerings: our search work and market mapping. While both of these can address your hiring needs, it is crucial to understand how they differ and therefore which is right for you and your business.

For both market mapping and search work, our client partners work with a research team with local language capabilities to deliver in depth research. However, where market mapping and our search work are crucially differentiated is by their purpose. Search work has the single aim of making a hire for a specific role, while market mapping can be used to a number of ends. Broadly speaking, it creates the context which enables a hiring decision by profiling a specific skillset, industry or region. In this respect, it can be used as a pre-search exercise to determine on the availability and prevalence of specific candidate profiles in a certain market. Market mapping can also be used to create in-depth profile of the structures and key personnel of a certain organisation, such as a client’s competitor.

While market mapping is not necessarily used to the end of making a hire, as search work invariably is, it can develop into this, and there are certain contexts where a market map makes sense as part of the hiring process. Where a client is looking to profile the market as an ongoing exercise to create a ‘talent pipeline’, market mapping provides visibility on candidates who can then be interviewed and hired as needed. Another advantage of market mapping is that the high volumes of candidates interviewed can streamline the process of internal talent acquisition building a shortlist, or it can be used to make multiple hires in the same skillset.

With both search and market mapping we remain in regular contact with our client throughout the process, providing written reports, data, talent profiles and organograms as desired. With market maps this presentation of information is bespoke according to the purpose our client sets for the market map: these could include a company map, geographical map, written report or call list, to give a few examples. Whatever your need, whether we are conducting a search or market mapping, we will strive to deliver excellence in a transparent and timely manner.

To find out more about how Chameleon International’s search work or market mapping could serve your organisation’s talent needs, please reach out to us at info@chameleon-international.com or on +44 207 799 2987.