How Artico Search is replacing its entire recruiting stack with Ema

Artico Search is a retained executive search firm that partners with CEOs, boards, and investors to hire C-level and VP scaleup talent. The firm serves high-growth, private equity, and enterprise clients across technology and adjacent sectors, with specialty practices spanning product, engineering, go-to-market, through to CEO and board.

Artico's search teams sat on a wealth of candidate intelligence, but it was fragmented across systems, went stale faster than it could be synthesized, and demanded hours of manual work to act on.

• Intelligence was fragmented across disconnected systems. The ATS, LinkedIn, outreach tools, and interviewing platforms each held a piece of the picture: candidate records in one place, relationship intelligence in another, outreach history in a third. None of it moved between them. Every handoff cost time and created another opportunity for data to be dropped, duplicated, or mis-entered.
• Data went stale faster than the team could synthesize it. An ATS is only as good as its last manual entry, and LinkedIn has become a static directory. The signals that mattered, like moves, funding events, and expanded mandates, lived elsewhere. By the time recruiters had stitched together intelligence from dozens of sources and applied it to a live search, the picture had already changed.
• Manual work capped throughput. Keeping records current, piecing together candidate research, mapping markets: all of it was recruiter toil. Market tools produced volume without precision, leaving recruiters filtering mismatched profiles instead of engaging top talent. Market mapping alone could take weeks before a search went to market, and a single client-quality scorecard took hours.

The result: higher cost per search, lower throughput, and quality that depended on heroics. Every search carried more manual hours than it should, the firm could take on fewer searches than its expertise warranted, and client-quality output relied on individual recruiters compensating for the systems around them.

Ema gives you the speed to compete and the judgment to win. Because the best hires aren't just fast. They're right. And when do you get both? You don't just scale. You compound.

Mercedes C Taylor

Co-founder & CEO

Artico adopted Ema in two phases: first as an AI recruiter for sourcing and screening, then as the platform powering its entire executive search workflow.

Phase 1: From role brief to ranked shortlist

Artico started by using Ema to automate the front end of executive search. Every search begins with a role brief, which Ema turns into a structured scorecard, searches against the full addressable market, and continuously refines as new information emerges.

• Search every source in one place. Ema searches Artico's proprietary candidate database alongside nearly one billion external profiles, company websites, news, publications, and other public sources, returning a single ranked shortlist without recruiters having to switch between tools.
• See the whole candidate, always current. Each profile combines multiple signals: social presence (Twitter/X, GitHub, blogs, academic pages), real-time news on career moves, restructurings, funding rounds, and growth announcements, and deep company data such as domain, size, industry, revenue, growth rate, and funding history. Inferred attributes like seniority level and years of experience accelerate fit assessment. Updates flow continuously from public data refreshes and verified company sources, often making Ema more current than LinkedIn. The result is a holistic, always-fresh view of candidates that surfaces top talent the moment they are most open to opportunities.
• Handle the most complex searches. The more specialized the search, the more value Ema delivers. One mandate required an unusual combination of forward-deployed engineering, within tight geographic constraints and with very specific skillsets. Research that previously took almost four weeks was completed in about five minutes.

Phase 2: Consolidating the stack, one system at a time

With sourcing and screening proven, Artico turned Ema toward its deepest challenge: a fragmented stack of disconnected tools. Rather than integrating those systems, the firm began retiring them.

• Outreach moved into Ema. Artico replaced its standalone outreach platform. Candidate engagement now runs natively within Ema, keeping every interaction connected to the search instead of siloed in a separate tool.
• LinkedIn Premium footprint shrank. With Ema searching nearly one billion profiles alongside Artico's proprietary database, the firm reduced its LinkedIn Premium seats while maintaining, and in many searches improving, candidate quality.
• The ATS is next. Ema already serves as Artico's system of intelligence, the place where candidate data is enriched, evaluated, and acted on. The next step is making it the system of record: replacing the legacy ATS and bringing more than 20 years of proprietary recruiting data into an AI-native platform that keeps those records continuously updated with real-time external intelligence.

Each system retired means less manual effort for the team, fewer handoffs where data can go stale or get lost, and lower cost per search.

Artico has tracked its performance for three years. In the last year, as Ema moved from sourcing engine toward system of intelligence, the gains compounded:

• Faster searches, same standards. Market mapping that took weeks and scorecards that took hours now happen in minutes, collapsing search completion from 120–140 days to inside 90, without lowering the bar on who makes the slate.
• More capacity, not more people. Artico took on 50–60% more work in the last year with zero increase in headcount, and the work requires fewer hands, freeing recruiters at every level, including junior professionals, to spend their time on judgment, relationships, and fit.
• One platform, one bill. The disparate stack search firms have always paid for, ATS, outreach software, LinkedIn subscriptions, note-takers, calendars, is now one platform, priced by what Artico uses.

The biggest ROI we're seeing is it takes a lot less hands to complete the work. And I don't think that should scare anybody, it's empowering even our junior professionals to focus a lot more on the true table stakes of executive search.

Ainur Lucas

Executive Search Consultant, Artico Search

For Artico, Ema is no longer a tool in the stack. It is the stack, running search end to end, from outreach through closure and reporting, and laying the foundation for what comes next: unified people intelligence that connects the signals recruiters hire on with how people actually perform once hired.