When does a hire become an Executive Search?

I've worked across recruitment and Executive Search for long enough to know that the boundary between the two is much less obvious than our industry pretends.

Good recruiters already find people who aren't looking. They search, challenge briefs, advise on salary and know their markets extraordinarily well. 

Equally, putting an Executive Search label on an assignment doesn't automatically make the thinking more sophisticated.

For me, the distinction is less about salary, seniority or whether a role is advertised, and more about the nature of the question you're trying to answer.

So, behind closed doors, how do we know when a hire has genuinely become a search?

Start with what you don't know

When a client gives us a recruitment brief, there will always be questions. With a search, the unanswered questions can become part of the assignment itself. 

You may know that you need a Commercial Director. What you don't yet know is whether the person who can take the business through its next stage is sitting in a competitor, has already moved into a broader MD role, comes from an adjacent market, or carries a title you wouldn't have thought to search for.

You could have three ostensibly strong internal candidates and no objective sense of how they compare with the external market.

Or you may know what you paid the last person without knowing what it now costs to attract someone better.

Sometimes a business takes the strongest elements of three people it admires, adds experience of a particular transformation, market, ownership structure and scale, then asks us to find the human being who contains all of them.

One of the first jobs of a search is establishing whether that person exists.

The bit you don't see

Clients naturally judge a search by the people they eventually meet. But we judge a large part of it by the people they don't.

Before five names appear on a shortlist, there is a much larger piece of work underneath. Companies need to be mapped, leadership teams examined, reporting structures understood and then recommendations are taken, individuals need to be considered and discounted. 

That invisible population is important.

Imagine we identify 80 plausible people and eventually recommend five.

The five tell you who you could appoint. But the other 75 help tell you whether we have understood the market.

They might show that the experience you want sits predominantly in businesses twice your size. Or that people with the transformation experience you value tend to have moved beyond the scope of the role you're offering. Perhaps an adjacent industry contains better candidates than the obvious competitor set. Or your salary is competitive until bonus, equity or flexibility enters the conversation.

None of those observations is a candidate.

That's why market mapping, done properly, is very different from compiling a long list of names.

Then the market starts talking back

This is one of the most useful parts of search and, strangely, one of the least discussed. 

We go out to market with a hypothesis.

We have a clear view on why the role is compelling, what the remuneration should be, where the relevant people are likely to sit and which experience matters most.

Then we start speaking to the market. And the market gets a vote.

If one exceptional executive doesn't like the reporting line, that's an opinion.

If eight independently ask why the role reports there, we have learnt something.

If the people the client most admires all earn considerably more than the proposed package, that doesn't make them greedy and it doesn't make the client wrong. It tells us that two pieces of information that looked compatible in the boardroom aren't compatible in the market.

A good search firm brings that information back.

We don't widen the search, massage the brief and hope nobody notices. Nor should we spend twelve weeks proving that the market ought to agree with an assumption it has already rejected.

The brief should be capable of surviving contact with reality. And if it doesn't, changing it can be evidence that the search is working.

There is another market that matters: the available one

Here's another distinction that gets lost when people talk about databases and networks. 

Knowing who could do the job is only the beginning. The person you want may already have a very good job. They may be well paid, trusted by their board, three years into an equity plan and halfway through something they genuinely want to finish.

At this end of the market, finding someone and creating the circumstances in which they will have a serious conversation are different skills entirely. And good search conversations tend to become very frank, very quickly.

•    Why this business?
•    Why now?
•    What would I actually inherit?
•    How good is the team?
•    How committed is the board to the change it says it wants?
•    Why did the last person leave?
•    What happens if the strategy doesn't work?

Senior people interrogate opportunities and they should. Those are the people you want to hire.

The obvious candidate is allowed to win

There is a misconception that a search has somehow failed to be imaginative if the successful person came from an obvious competitor. I don't agree.

If we examine the market properly, challenge the assumptions, look into adjacent pools, assess credible alternatives and eventually conclude that the person everyone mentioned in week one is the strongest candidate, that's a perfectly good outcome.

The search wasn't there to produce a surprise.

It was there to establish whether the obvious answer remained the best answer once the alternatives were understood. There is a world of difference between we know her, let's hire her and we tested the market and now understand why she is the strongest person for this particular job.

The name might be identical, but the quality of the decision isn't.

A CV becomes less useful the more consequential the appointment becomes

Executive CVs tend to be impressive. That can create a problem of it’s own. By the time someone is being considered for a significant leadership position, you are rarely choosing between one accomplished person and four people who plainly can't do the job.

You're choosing between accomplished people whose success was created under different conditions.

One grew a business with substantial investment behind them. Another delivered growth while taking cost out. This candidate inherited an exceptional team; while the other had to build one. 

The job is to understand what lead to their results:

• What decisions did they personally make?
• What did they inherit?
• What changed because they were there?
• Where have they struggled?
• Which conditions allow them to do their best work?
• And, perhaps most importantly, which parts of their previous success are likely to travel?

Your internal candidate should make the search harder

I've always found it strange when internal and external candidates are treated as though they are competing in different events. If someone inside the organisation could credibly do the job, they belong in the same intellectual exercise.

The external market gives you a benchmark.

Suddenly the conversation about the internal person gets better. You can ask whether their knowledge of the organisation outweighs experience they haven't yet had. Whether the external candidate's broader track record outweighs the internal person's credibility with the team. Whether the gap is genuinely a gap, or something that could be developed.

There are searches where the best outcome is an external appointment. There are others where looking outside gives a board the confidence to promote from within. Search should improve the decision, whichever way the decision goes.

Here's one of the industry's less convenient secrets

Established retained firms have what are known as off-limits arrangements. In simple terms, there will be organisations or individuals a search firm has agreed not to recruit from because of existing or previous client relationships, placements or contractual commitments.

So your chosen firm can have extraordinary credentials in your sector and, as a consequence of all that work, be restricted from approaching parts of the very market you want to explore.

It doesn't automatically make them the wrong firm. But before appointing a search partner, I'd ask a very straightforward question, “Who can't you approach for us?”

And yes, AI has changed search

It would be ridiculous to write about Executive Search now and pretend otherwise. Technology can now help us find connections, process large amounts of information, identify patterns, summarise careers, interrogate markets and work through data at a speed that wasn't possible a few years ago. That's useful.

It also exposes something the industry could previously hide behind, which is that finding names is becoming easier. But knowing that somebody exists isn't the same as knowing whether they're good. A beautifully generated market map is useless if the assumptions behind it are poor.

An AI tool can spot that two people have similar career histories. It cannot take responsibility for telling a board that one of them is much more likely to succeed in the particular organisation they're about to inherit.

So when does a hire become a search?

There isn't a salary at which a switch flips.

And I wouldn't turn every senior appointment into Executive Search simply because the consequences feel important. If you know what you need, understand the market, can reach the relevant people and have enough evidence to make a good decision, excellent recruitment can be exactly the right answer.

A hire starts becoming a search when the organisation needs to understand the market as thoroughly as it needs to meet candidates.

• Are there material assumptions to test?
• Does the relevant population needs to be established rather than presumed?
• Are the strongest people unlikely to enter the process without a considered approach?
• Do you have internal talent that needs to be judged against external possibility?
• Does the nature of the appointment require discretion in how the market is approached?
• Could what we learn from the market change who we decide to hire?

That's the difference I would care about.

If you’re considering a senior appointment and the questions go beyond finding candidates, it’s worth having the conversation before the brief is fixed. We can help you understand the market, test the assumptions behind the role and decide what kind of search (or recruitment process) the appointment actually needs.

Explore our Executive Search and Talent Strategy & Delivery Models services, or talk to us on 03303 359 818 or connect@denholmassociates.com.