A search firm talks to a hundred senior people in your market on every assignment. Most of what it learns is thrown away when the search closes. An annual partnership is partly a way of keeping it.
Movements
Who has moved, who is about to, and who has just been passed over for a promotion and is now listening. This is the information that makes the next search faster, because the first ten approaches are people we already know will take the call.
Reward
What comparable roles are paying this quarter, from conversations rather than surveys. Which packages are winning candidates and which are losing them. Whether your own packages have drifted below the market without anyone noticing, which they usually have by year three.
Competitor structures
What functions competitors are creating, expanding or cutting. A competitor recruiting a first chief data officer tells you something about their plan. Three competitors doing it tells you something about yours.
Approachability
The most useful and least formal part. A short list of people in the market who could do your most likely next role, with a note on whether they would take a call today. Not a search, and not an approach. A view.
How it arrives
A short written note each quarter, ahead of the review meeting, and a conversation whenever something moves that you would want to know about the same week. We do not produce reports for the sake of it; a one-page note that says three things is more use than a twenty-page one that says the same three things.
What it is not
It is not gossip about named individuals passed on without their knowledge, and it is not information gained in confidence during a search for another client. Both would end the partnership on the other side, and they should.