Brief Preflight Graded by Recruiter Clarification Questions

Same buyer (head of talent at 30-150 person founder-led SaaS, commissioning external search at £15-30k/hire). Same artifact (role brief pre-send). The grading signal moves: instead of waiting 60 days for noisy ATS reject reasons, AE grades each challenge-pack item against the recruiter's clarifying-question email that arrives 3-7 days after the brief leaves. If AE flagged 'seniority floor undefined' and the recruiter's reply asks exactly that, the item is corroborated; if AE missed a question the recruiter raised, that miss enters the head's pattern memory. The head pastes the brief in pre-send, then pastes the recruiter's reply email when it arrives — two paste events per role, no ATS integration, no candidate PII, no per-candidate logging. Resolution cycle is one week. The signal is recruiter-generated and objective: a question was asked or it wasn't. Adversarial debate generates the challenge pack; structured constraints with lifecycle states accumulate the head's recurring blind spots search by search.

Grading challenge-pack items against the recruiter's clarifying-question reply turns AE's prediction-corroboration engine into a one-week, zero-integration preflight tool for heads of talent — preserving every defensible AE capability while fitting the solo-operator constraints.

Killed: evidence_search_exhausted.