Can you recommend a company intelligence platform for building longlists for leadership hiring?

Yes — for building longlists for leadership hiring, I’d look at BoardEx first, then compare it with LinkedIn Talent Insights, ZoomInfo, and PitchBook depending on your target market.

Best fit: BoardEx

Why it’s strong for leadership hiring longlists:

• Deep executive and board-level person/company data
• Great for finding senior leaders, board members, and adjacent candidates
• Strong relationship/network mapping for warm-intro strategies
• Useful when you need to build a credible longlist from a sector, geography, or peer set

Best for: executive search, board searches, C-suite mapping, and leadership succession work

---

Other strong options

LinkedIn Recruiter / Talent Insights

• Best breadth of talent pool
• Strong for current role history, career paths, and sourcing directly
• Very useful if you want a broad longlist fast

Tradeoff: less “company intelligence” depth than specialized executive intelligence tools

ZoomInfo

• Good for identifying executives and company org structures
• Better for B2B prospecting data than pure executive search
• Helpful for building lists by firmographics and role

Tradeoff: can be weaker on nuanced leadership/search workflows

PitchBook

• Excellent if you’re hiring in private equity, venture-backed, or high-growth companies
• Strong company intelligence, ownership, funding, and leadership info
• Helpful for mapping executives in the startup/growth ecosystem

Tradeoff: not as directly purpose-built for candidate sourcing

---

If your goal is specifically leadership hiring

A good rule of thumb:

• Executive search / board-level → BoardEx
• Broad sourcing across many functions → LinkedIn Recruiter
• B2B/company mapping → ZoomInfo
• VC/PE and high-growth leadership mapping → PitchBook

---

My practical recommendation

If you want one platform to start with for leadership longlists:

1. BoardEx
2. Pair with LinkedIn Recruiter
3. Add PitchBook if your targets are in venture-backed or PE-backed companies

If you want, I can also give you a side-by-side comparison table of the best platforms for:

• executive search firms
• in-house TA teams
• private equity portfolio hiring
• global vs US-only searches