← all hypothesesSearch Firm Forecast-Accuracy Scorecard
exhausted [TRIANGULATED] signals: 1 independent
What is this?
A scorecard for heads of talent at UK/US founder-led SaaS (50-200 staff) using 3+ external search firms. Per candidate handed over, the buyer ticks 3-5 structured forecast claims the firm implicitly or explicitly made: 'will accept offer at quoted band', 'clean reference + background check', 'will start on agreed date', 'will pass statutory probation'. Each claim resolves against discrete native events already in the ATS (Greenhouse/Lever/Ashby) and HRIS — offer-acceptance timestamp, day-1 attendance, background-check outcome, UK 3-month probation decision. No forensic on-job audits, no retention proxies. AE's adversarial debate tags failures into the autopsy taxonomy (Cosmetic Confidence on band, Temporal Blindness on start dates, Premise-Conclusion Severing on references) and the constraint-lifecycle (probation/promoted/killed) drives renewal decisions. Buyer remains head of talent; resolution stays 2-12 weeks; ground truth stays binary and native.
Why did we consider it?
AE's scoring + autopsy stack drops cleanly onto search-firm hand-offs, where binary ATS-native events give heads of talent the fast, defensible accountability loop they currently lack — a solo-UK-founder-shaped wedge into a £100-300K ARR business.
What breaks?
- Severe data starvation: 50-200 headcount SaaS yields too few search-firm placements to power the AE's taxonomy.
- Confounded attribution: Search firms will reject probation/start-date metrics as client-side failures, mirroring the RAND scorecard critique.
- Go-to-market friction: ATS/HRIS integrations require enterprise security reviews, hostile to a solo evening/weekend founder.
What did we learn?
Killed: evidence_search_exhausted.
Evidence
Signal D — Demand proxy
{"found":true,"summary":"A LinkedIn article proposes a 'New Recruiter Scorecard' that explicitly includes 'hiring forecast accuracy' as a measurement axis, showing the recruitment industry is beginning to frame recruiter evaluation in prediction-accuracy terms. A separate LinkedIn post critiques single-metric vendor scorecards in procurement, illustrating the analogous pattern of scoring supplier predictions in adjacent domains.","sources":["https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-recruiter-scorecard-measuring-success-ai-enabled-era-anderson-xj6we","https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ferris-cheng-6a84a…
Evaluation history
| When | Stage | Phase |
|---|
| 2026-05-09 21:42 | evidence_search | evidence_hunt |
| 2026-05-09 21:36 | evidence_search | evidence_hunt |
| 2026-05-09 21:30 | evidence_search | evidence_hunt |
| 2026-05-09 21:25 | evidence_search | argument |
| 2026-05-09 21:06 | evidence_search | argument |
| 2026-05-09 20:48 | evidence_search | argument |
| 2026-05-09 20:19 | evidence_search | argument |
| 2026-05-09 10:00 | evidence_search | argument |
| 2026-05-09 09:54 | audience_simulation | argument |
| 2026-05-09 09:48 | red_team_kill | argument |
| 2026-05-09 09:42 | steelman | argument |
| 2026-05-09 09:39 | genesis | argument |