Kindred Partners Gets Candidates in Front of Clients 34% Faster with Stardex

Kindred Partners has spent over 20 years building leadership teams for venture-backed technology and healthcare companies. The roughly 25-person retained executive search firm works with VC firms and their portfolio companies, often at Series A and Series B, on CEO and management-team searches.

Kindred had a strong outbound stack, but its ATS was falling behind. Years of candidate conversations and relationship history sat in their previous system as static information the team struggled to put to work.

Our old system was a store of information for us … that information was static, it was depreciating aggressively and we couldn't use it in the way that we wanted to.

— Matt Ocken, Senior Partner, Kindred Partners

Kindred moved to Stardex with more than a decade of search history. The early results show the team getting candidates in front of clients sooner and making better use of the great candidates already in its network.

The Results

First candidates reach clients 34% sooner. Median time from search open to the first candidate presented to a client dropped 34%. Kindred is getting candidates in front of clients much faster.

Kindred is meeting candidates sooner, too. Median time to the first candidate interviewed by the firm fell by just shy of 40% as well. This translates to more qualified candidates for clients, much sooner than before.

More of those candidates come from Kindred's own database. Among candidates presented to clients, 73% already existed in the database when they were added to the search, up from 66% before the switch. Kindred is now able to tap its own network more quickly and thoroughly than they were before Stardex.

Putting 25 Years of Relationships to Work

For Matt, access to a larger pool of public candidate data wasn't a differentiator. Kindred's advantage was the knowledge it had built through years of meetings, interviews, and relationships: what matters to a candidate, what they're looking for, and the context behind a career move.

Everybody has access to public data. That's not a differentiator. The differentiator is our data, our information.

— Matt Ocken, Senior Partner, Kindred Partners

That shaped the evaluation. Kindred wanted a system that started with the firm's own context, knowledge, and expertise. Stardex gave the team a way to put that history to work on each new search. The increase in existing-database candidates reaching clients early in the search process is an indicator of that paying off.

A Head Start Before the Search Opens

The workflow now starts in business development. Kindred uses Stardex's CRM to track potential projects, enrich company information, and connect client conversations to company and opportunity records. Notes from Granola and research from tools including Harmonic feed into that process.

We're going from company identification … to a market map and potential candidates that we should think about in real time. So that's an immediate thing, really.

— Matt Ocken, Senior Partner, Kindred Partners

When the firm wins the work, it converts the opportunity into an active search with the groundwork already in place. Company context, competitive research, and early thinking about candidates carry forward. The team can start with profiles in its own database and extend the research through external market mapping.

Matt describes the biggest change in the research process being how quickly the team gets going. Research begins while the opportunity is still taking shape, giving the search a head start before the formal kickoff.

The Takeaway

Kindred's investment in relationships is showing up in its pipeline: earlier candidate introductions, more searches with a five-candidate slate in the first month, and a larger share of client presentations drawn from its own database.

For Matt, the team's response and the pace of product improvement make the case for the switch just as clearly.

Stardex is great. Everybody here is incredibly happy with it. The pace of … product improvement that we're seeing from you all is amazing.

— Matt Ocken, Senior Partner, Kindred Partners