How to market map a sector, worked end to end

A market map is only as good as the method behind it. Get the method right and you can point it at any sector and turn the handle. Get it wrong and you have a tidy spreadsheet that tells the client nothing they did not already know.

So rather than describe market mapping in the abstract, here it is worked end to end on a single sector, with the steps in the order you would actually do them. The example is UK fintech engineering leadership, the kind of brief an agency gets when a scaling payments firm wants to know who could run its engineering function. Swap in your own sector and the method holds.

The numbers in this guide are illustrative and labelled as such. They show the shape of a real result, not a real dataset.

What is market mapping in recruitment?

Market mapping is the exercise of charting the companies, team structures, roles and people across a defined market, so you understand the landscape before you try to hire from it.

In an agency it is external work: you are mapping a market you do not employ, on behalf of a client who wants to hire into it or understand it. That is a different thing from the internal nine-box review that shares the name in corporate HR. For the full distinction between mapping the market and mapping the people on it, see talent mapping vs market mapping.

The rest of this guide is the how, in five steps.

Step 1: Define the brief and boundaries

Every weak map fails here, by being vague about its edges. Before you find a single person, write down four boundaries and get the client to agree them.

• Role family. Not "engineers" but the specific population. In our example: engineering leadership, meaning Heads of Engineering, Directors, VPs and CTOs, not individual contributors.
• Seniority band. Where the map starts and stops. Here, anyone managing managers or owning a function, roughly Director level and above.
• Geography. A real boundary, not a vibe. For us, the UK, weighted to London and the larger regional tech hubs.
• Target-company criteria. The rule that decides whether a company is in or out. Ours: UK-headquartered or UK-operating fintechs in payments, lending, banking infrastructure or wealth, past Series A, under roughly 2,000 staff.

Write the inclusion rule as a sentence you could hand to someone else. If two researchers would build different maps from your brief, the brief is not finished.

This is also where you and the client agree what the map is for. A map built to win a single CTO search looks different from one built to benchmark a whole function's pay. Same method, different emphasis.

Step 2: Build the company universe

Start with companies, not people. This is the single most important sequencing decision in market mapping, and the one most people get backwards.

It is tempting to begin by listing the impressive individuals you already know. Do that and you bake your existing network into the map as if it were the whole market. Start with the company universe instead and the people fall out of it in a way you can defend.

Build the universe in two passes.

First, the direct set: companies that obviously match the brief. For UK fintech you would list the payments names, the challenger banks, the lending platforms, the well-funded infrastructure players. This pass is fast and mostly comes from memory and a few funding databases.

Second, the adjacent set: companies that are not the obvious target but hold the right talent. Engineering leaders in payments often come from outside payments, from broader fintech, from high-scale consumer tech, from the engineering functions of traditional banks. Adjacencies are where a map earns its fee, because they surface people the client's own team would never have thought to look for.

For our worked example the universe lands at around 45 companies: roughly 30 direct fintechs and 15 adjacents. That is the representative shape for a single function in one country. Far fewer and you are describing your address book; far more and the map loses focus.

Step 3: Map the people

Now, and only now, the people. For each company in the universe you are looking for the individuals who fit the role family and seniority band from Step 1.

For each person you want a consistent core: name, current title, company, how long they have been there, who they appear to report to, and a public profile link. Consistency matters more than completeness here. A map where every row has the same five fields is readable; a map where every row has different gaps is not.

This is the slow part, and historically the expensive one. Finding 200 people across 45 companies and turning each scattered profile into one structured row is hours of copy, paste and tidy. It is also the part where margin quietly disappears.

This is where TalentMaps does the heavy lifting. You paste the LinkedIn URLs for the people you have identified, and it enriches and structures each one into the same consistent profile shape, so the map is built from clean, comparable rows rather than handcrafted notes. It compresses the gather-and-tidy step from days into hours.

It will not decide who belongs on the map; that judgement is yours, and the enrichment always deserves a sense-check. But it turns the longest, dullest stretch of the work into something repeatable. For the bare, sector-agnostic version of this workflow, see how to do talent mapping.

Step 4: Layer the intelligence

A list of people is a directory. Intelligence is what makes it a map. Once the rows are clean, layer on the context that lets the client make a decision.

Four layers do most of the work:

• Compensation ranges. Banded, not precise. For UK fintech engineering leadership you might show Director-level total comp clustering in one band and VP and above in a higher one, drawn from market benchmarks and labelled as estimates. Clients fund maps to answer "what will this cost", so do not skip it.
• Availability signals. Soft reads on who might move: long tenure approaching the typical itch point, a recent reorg, a company that has just had a down round. None of these is certainty, all of them are useful.
• Movement. Who has changed roles recently, and the direction of travel between companies. A cluster of leaders leaving one firm for another tells the client something the headcount numbers do not.
• A diversity lens. What the available leadership market actually looks like against the client's representation goals, so the brief is set against a realistic baseline rather than a hope.

Each layer is a column of judgement on top of the factual rows. This is the part a client cannot get from a database, and the part you are really being paid for.

Step 5: Package and present

The same map can land or fall flat depending on how it arrives. A raw spreadsheet says "research"; a structured, branded document says "product the client paid for".

Keep the packaging tight: a one-page read of the market at the top (depth, hot companies, salary spread, the recommendation), then the structured detail beneath it. Lead with the intelligence, not the rows. TalentMaps exports the finished map as a branded PDF or PPTX you can present the same day, which is what turns the method into something sellable rather than internal.

For the full treatment of what belongs inside that deliverable and how to present it to a client, see what goes in a market map.

What the finished map tells you

Worked through end to end, the UK fintech engineering-leadership map comes back saying things the client could not see before. With illustrative figures:

• The market is deeper than feared but shallower than hoped. Around 200 leaders fit the brief, but only a fraction sit at true VP-or-above scale, so the genuinely senior pool is perhaps 40 to 50 people.
• A handful of companies are doing the training. Two or three scale-ups recur as the previous employer of a disproportionate share of the strongest leaders. Those are the hunting grounds.
• Pay has a wide spread. Director-level total comp ranges roughly two-fold across the set, which tells the client their budget assumption is either generous or short depending on the calibre they want.
• Movement is clustering. A noticeable group has moved towards infrastructure and payments in the past year, a directional signal about where this talent thinks the growth is.

That is the difference between a map and a list. The list says who is out there. The map says what that means for the decision in front of the client.

Now swap in your sector

The sector here was UK fintech engineering leadership, but nothing about the method is fintech-specific. Define the brief and its boundaries, build the company universe before you touch the people, map the individuals into consistent rows, layer the intelligence, then package it like something worth paying for.

Run that on legal, on industrial, on healthcare, on whatever market your next brief lands in, and you get the same kind of result: a defensible read of a market, not a directory.

For the repeatable method stripped of the worked example, see how to do talent mapping, and for where mapping sits in the wider agency picture, see the complete guide to talent mapping for recruitment agencies. When you are ready to map your own sector, start a map in TalentMaps and let the tooling carry the slow middle.

Frequently asked questions

How long does market mapping take?

A focused single-function map of one market takes a researcher a few days of concentrated work, most of it spent finding and structuring people rather than thinking. The thinking, defining the brief and reading the finished landscape, is fast. Tooling that enriches profiles automatically tends to collapse the slow middle from days to hours, which is where most of the cost sits.

How many companies should a market map cover?

Enough to be representative, not so many that the map drowns in noise. For a single function in one country, a universe of roughly 30 to 60 companies usually captures the direct competitors plus the obvious adjacent talent pools. Define the inclusion rule first, then let it decide the count, rather than picking a round number and working backwards.

Can you market map a sector without LinkedIn?

You can, but it is slower and patchier. LinkedIn is the most complete public record of who works where, so most maps start there and corroborate with company sites, filings, conference speaker lists and press. Without it you lean harder on those secondary sources and on your own network, which is fine for a market you already know well and painful for one you do not.