Ask ten recruiters what market mapping means and you will get ten answers, most of which describe a one-off exercise a client paid for. On a specialist desk, the useful version is smaller and permanent.
The question a market map answers
Not "who is in this market". That is a directory question. The market map answers: where is the work going to come from next, and who signs for it.
That reframes the content. You are tracking structures and budget, not just names:
- Which teams exist, and which are newly created
- Who owns hiring budget, and who influences it
- What the organisation has publicly committed to (a new product, a new region, a new accreditation)
- Where they have failed to hire, repeatedly
The last one is the most commercially useful and the least commonly recorded. A role reposted three times is an admission.
Working from public, sourced material
Everything above can be assembled from material that is already public: job adverts, funding announcements, regulatory filings, conference programmes, leadership pages, published interviews.
The rule we hold ourselves to, and build into Holi, is that nothing goes in the map without a source line. If you cannot say where a claim came from, it is a rumour, and rumours make for bad opening lines.
A weekly rhythm, not a quarterly project
Fifteen minutes on a Friday beats a two-day project in March.
- Scan the week's adverts across your top accounts and their competitors
- Note anything reposted, retitled, or newly created
- Record any leadership change with the date you saw it
- Convert anything under a week old into a call for Monday
That is the whole method. The reason it works is that mapping and business development stop being separate activities. You are not researching in order to sell later, you are researching and generating the sell in the same pass.
Where it goes wrong
Breadth over depth. A map that covers a whole sector is a research artefact. A map that covers thirty organisations you could realistically service is a pipeline.
No decay. Structures change. A team chart from eighteen months ago is not neutral, it is misleading, and it will make you sound out of touch on a call.
Stored where nobody looks. If the map lives in a document you have to remember to open, it will not survive contact with a busy week. It has to surface itself in the place where you plan your day.
What good looks like after a quarter
You should be able to answer, without opening anything, three questions about your top ten accounts: who leads hiring, what they are building, and what they have failed to fill. If you can, the map is working. If you cannot, you have a directory with better formatting.