Case Study
Riviera Partners is the largest tech-focused executive search firm in the world. As it scaled into PE and public-company searches across the US and Europe, Vela replaced its patchwork of outside coordinators with one firm-wide standard - doing the work of roughly 25 dedicated hires at a fraction of the cost.
Company
Riviera Partners
Industry
Executive Search (Technology Leadership)
Headquarters
San Francisco, CA
Reach
US + Europe (London), 5 practices
Team on Vela
~45 directors and partners across practices
Previous solution
Outside recruiting coordinators and EAs; inconsistent or no dedicated support
Contract
Multi-year
"The best AI coordinator I've ever worked with, and purely the best coordinator I've ever worked with. Vela follows up to make sure we get things scheduled, and if I need to clear my day it is one note away. Incredible."
From a public LinkedIn post
Riviera grew by 125 people last year and kept hiring into this one. As the firm diversified from its venture roots into PE and public-company searches, and as more of its work went global, the coordination load exploded. A single executive search can mean lining up a client's panel, a candidate who is themselves a senior executive, and an internal search team - often across time zones, in different countries, through multiple interview rounds.
The hardest part was never any one meeting. It was knowing who's outstanding - which interviews weren't yet scheduled, and where a search was quietly stalling.
That work was being absorbed by a mix of outside recruiting coordinators and executive assistants, plus a thin layer of shared or partner-by-partner support. It didn't hold. Coverage was inconsistent, the candidate-facing tone and follow-up varied by whoever happened to be staffed, and many partners ran solo searches with no real support at all. It was the kind of complexity no generic tool had ever cracked.
"Finally, someone's trying to crack this nut. I literally remember looking at a vendor 10 years ago, because everyone's tried to do this. And it's hard."
Riviera didn't change how it works. Directors and partners loop Vela into the thread, exactly as they would a recruiting coordinator, and Vela takes it from there. No platform to log into, no links to send.
The rollout was built around the firm's real structure, going practice by practice - London first, then PE, then ventures and public. Power users customized their own setups during the pilot, and Vela's team codified those into a firm-wide standard: the firm's naming conventions, calendar hygiene, and defaults like "schedule as fast as possible" and "no meetings outside working hours."
From there it adapts to each person in plain English. It knows a client call outranks an internal sync, handles the multi-party cases - panels, slates, debriefs, candidate-client interviews - and follows up on a 24-hour cadence (faster when a search is urgent), escalating to a human only when it's truly stuck. And it runs around the clock, which matters for a firm split across US and European time zones.
"I just got an email a minute ago saying it had scheduled 30 minutes tomorrow at 1:30 Pacific. I'm honestly a little freaked out that it handled all that."
The director or partner emails as they normally would and adds Vela to the thread. No new tools, no changed workflow.
Vela reads the context, checks all connected calendars, and runs the back-and-forth across client, candidate, and search team - converting time zones, applying the firm's naming and tagging conventions, and following up automatically when someone goes quiet.
Vela sends the invite with the right tooling attached, color-codes and names it to Riviera's standard, and handles every reschedule on its own if anything changes.
$2.35M
Annual savings vs. staffing the work directly
25
Full-time hires' worth of coordination replaced
24/7
Coverage across US and European time zones
1
Firm-wide scheduling standard across 5 practices
$2.35M
Annual savings vs. staffing the work directly
25
Full-time hires' worth of coordination replaced
24/7
Coverage across US and European time zones
1
Firm-wide scheduling standard across 5 practices
Rolled out practice by practice, Vela replaced inconsistent outside coordination with one firm-wide standard - the same tone, follow-up, and speed on every search, whether the partner had a coordinator before or none at all.
"honestly it's been great so far... it has saved me a load of time"
"It's too good to be true. I'm not going to lie."
"excellent, loving it so far."
"Overall, LOVE Vela. I've been mainly using it for scheduling candidate calls."
One standard. Every search. Every time zone. See how Vela works - book a 15-minute demo.
