Building a better "Employee Chooser"

I have been faced with a UI design problem on our Performance Management system that I am currently building.



There is one area within the site where leaders have the ability to choose another employee within the company to request feedback for one of their direct report's performance review. This is simple stuff, except the UI bit for picking what employee to send the request to.



I have written a couple other apps in the past that needed to do this type of work, but I really did not like the solutions I came up with, namely some type of a drop down list or select list with all the names listed. Problem is, with over 4k employees...this is a really long list.



I like the idea of a type-ahead search box that could show the name, title and photo of a group of employees based on the search string entered. Something like Google's Enterprise Labs "Search as you Type" plug-in for the Google Search Appliance.


So what other ideas do you all have? Please leave me a comment!