5 Reasons the Market Isn’t to Blame for Your Slow Senior Search

Written by

When a senior search runs long, the explanation is almost always the same, and it always points outwards. The market is tight, the right people aren’t looking, notice periods are brutal. All of that is usually true, but those reasons aren’t the the only thing contributing to this.

In our experience, the biggest delays on a senior hire tend to be the ones nobody names in the debrief, because they didn’t come from the market at all. The market gets the blame because the market can’t answer back, the real hold-ups came from inside the building.

The CIPD’s latest Labour Market Outlook has hiring intentions at their lowest on record outside the first year of the pandemic, with more than a third of employers planning to pull back on permanent recruitment because of the Employment Rights Act. When the strongest senior people are wary of moving and employers are wary of hiring, momentum is one of the few parts of the senior hiring process you fully control, whether you are hiring senior HR or filling any seat around the board table.

Here are the five things that drain it, and why three of them are coming from inside the building.

 

The three you can do something about

 

The decision that won’t land

This is the one we see most often, a strong candidate clears the final stage, everyone round the table agrees they are excellent, and then nothing happens for a fortnight, because the panel cannot reconvene, or the one person whose view really counts is on holiday, or the sign-off needs three senior diaries to meet on the same afternoon. To you it feels like ordinary scheduling, but to the candidate it reads as doubt.

In that same fortnight they take another call, or their current employer notices they have gone quiet and moves to keep them. The slowest part of the senior hiring process is almost never the search itself. It is the distance between deciding and acting. The fix is unglamorous and almost always works: agree who the decision-makers are, and when they are free, before you interview the shortlist rather than after.

A brief that won’t sit still

A search begins as one role and drifts into another, a little more commercial this week, a little more transformation the next, until someone senior asks whether the role is even needed in this shape. It is usually a leadership team that never quite agreed what it was hiring for, working that disagreement out in public and on your time. Each change feels small in the room where it is made.

On the search it means going back to people you have already approached with a different story, conceding that the goalposts moved, and presenting to the market as an organisation unsure of its own mind. It is not free, either. Every reset costs a week or two and a little more of the goodwill of people who agreed to talk to you on the strength of the original pitch.

One stage too many

Extra rounds get added for sensible-sounding reasons: a new stakeholder wants their own meeting, or a nervous panel adds a stage to be sure. A five-step process becomes eight. Each addition looks reasonable alone, but together they cost you the strongest candidates, who have other options and drop out first.

The ones who stay are often those without a better alternative, which is the opposite of who you wanted. A drawn-out process also signals an organisation that is slow and unsure, and senior candidates read that clearly. A good executive search should get sharper as it narrows.

 

The two you plan around

 

The best people aren’t looking

At this level the person you actually want is employed, respected and reasonably settled, and prising them loose takes time and a reason worth moving for. Even in a soft market, the same CIPD research found that around a third of employers still have vacancies they can’t fill, and senior specialisms are where that pinches hardest.

This is less a problem to solve than one to plan for, with an honest timeline and an executive search that goes out and finds people rather than waiting for the right ones to apply. Attracting someone who was not looking is the part that genuinely takes time, and it is the part worth being patient about.

The practical drag of a senior move

Three and six-month notice periods, gardening leave, a counter-offer to see off, the careful choreography of resigning a board-level job. From the first conversation to the first day, a senior hire can take the better part of a year, and almost none of that closing stretch sits in anyone’s control.

The mistake isn’t the delay itself, but the failing to build it into the plan, so that a wholly predictable notice period lands like a shock in month four. A realistic plan treats the offer as the middle of the process rather than the end.

What it adds up to

The two market delays are simply facts, and the useful thing about facts is that you can plan for them. You can build a search around scarce candidates and long notice. What you cannot build around is a senior hiring process at war with itself.

When we look back at the searches that dragged, the market always played some part, but the deciding factor was nearly always internal: a decision left to wait, a brief that kept moving, a stage that should never have been added. None of the three is hard to fix. Fixing them is usually the difference between landing your first choice and settling, several months later, for your third.

If you are hiring senior HR, or any board-level appointment, and you want the process to keep pace with the people you are trying to attract, that is a conversation we have most weeks. Get in touch with James Cumming at re:find.

Why the Board Takes Some HR Leaders Seriously and Not Others

Written by

The CHRO search we run gives us a close view of how senior HR leaders land once they’re in the role, and the same contrast comes up again and again. Some shape the decisions the board makes. Others give their update, and the conversation moves on without them. It’s not that one group is in the room and the other isn’t; more CHROs reach the boardroom than a few years ago, and the Conference Board reports board engagement with them rising at nearly 70% of public companies. The difference is what happens once they’re there. Being HR in the boardroom isn’t the same as being heard in it.

Some of that gap isn’t the CHRO’s fault. Protiviti’s 2026 risk survey ranks human capital just outside the board’s top five priorities, some way below where CHROs themselves rank it, so the room isn’t always ready to listen. But most of the gap is the CHRO’s to close, and in our experience it comes down to a handful of habits rather than to brains or effort. Here’s what makes a board switch off, and what makes it lean in.

 

When the board tunes out

 

Activity instead of consequence

Walk into a board meeting with a list of what HR has been busy with, engagement scores, headcount, training completions, time to hire, and you’ll lose the room. It isn’t that the board doubts the figures; it just can’t see what they have to do with running the business. A number only earns the board’s attention once it’s tied to something the board already worries about. “Attrition is down two points” means nothing on its own. “The people we’re losing are all in the sales team, that’s why the pipeline slipped, and here’s what it costs to fix” is a completely different conversation, because now there’s a problem, a cause and a decision in front of them. That’s what a board wants from HR: not a bigger dashboard, but the two or three numbers that genuinely threaten the plan, and a clear view of what you’re doing about them.

The wrong language

A lot of HR leaders lose the board simply by how they talk. Within HR, terms like competency frameworks, EVP, and capability matrices are precise and useful. In front of a board they’re just jargon, and jargon makes you sound like someone who can’t put their own work into the terms the board cares about: risk, cost, capability and value. The people who get heard don’t use that internal language at all; they talk about people the way the CFO talks about money. It isn’t that the board can’t grasp the ideas. Translating them into the board’s terms is the CHRO’s job, and not doing it makes you look like you can’t connect people to performance. 

Problems without a recommendation

Boards are built to make decisions, so they engage with a decision and switch off at a briefing. Senior HR leaders who arrive with a problem and a budget request but no recommendation get handled as a function looking for direction. Ask the board “here’s the issue, what do you think” and you’ve handed your own thinking to them. Come with “here’s the risk, here are two options, and here’s the one I’d back, and why” and you’re an executive making a case. It’s the same information either way; what changes is where you stand once you’ve said it.

Refind blog size (4)

When the board leans in

 

People framed as risk and value

Everything changes the moment a people issue is put to the board as a business issue. “Culture is a priority” is easy to nod through and forget; “the culture in this division is why the acquisition won’t integrate, and it’s putting the synergy case at risk” is not. “We should invest in leadership” goes nowhere; “we’ve no successor for three of our top ten roles, and that’s a continuity risk the board needs to see” gets written into the minutes. Tie talent, culture and capability to strategy, cost and risk, and you’re into real board influence, because now you’re talking about the things the board exists to protect. The wording barely changes, but the effect does: a board was always going to act on a threat to the synergy case, and never on a culture programme.

Evidence the board can act on

Boards run on evidence, and they hold workforce numbers to the same bar as the finance ones. Stories about morale don’t move them, and neither does last quarter’s engagement survey; what moves them is what’s coming next, where the flight risk sits, which leaders are ready and which aren’t, where a capability gap will start to bite a year or two out. Bring that kind of forward view and a chief people officer gets the same hearing the CFO gets for the accounts. Bring a backward-looking dashboard and you don’t.

A point of view, delivered as a peer

Most of all, a board listens to someone who holds a view and will defend it. That takes commercial fluency, the nerve to challenge a decision that carries a people risk everyone else has missed, and the calm to do it as a peer rather than a supplier. Deference gives the game away; it’s the tell of someone who isn’t quite sure they belong in the room. The chief people officer who can disagree well earns respect for it, and that respect is where real board influence lives. A board usually knows within a meeting or two which it’s dealing with: a peer who happens to run people, or a department head who’s been invited in to observe.

 

Getting into the room is settled; being heard once you’re there isn’t. You earn it by talking about people the way the board already talks about money and risk, with evidence, with options, and with a view you’ll stand behind. That’s the whole difference between HR in the boardroom and HR that’s simply there for the meeting.

There’s something in this for boards and chief executives too, because you tend to get the HR you ask for. Ask only for the HR update and that’s exactly what you’ll get. Ask your most senior people leader to own workforce risk and value the way the CFO owns the balance sheet, and a good one will rise to it, while the wrong one will show you they can’t, which is worth knowing before your next appointment. Treat HR in the boardroom as a genuine source of risk insight rather than a standing report, and the people who matter start to stand out: rarely the loudest in the room, usually the ones you’d miss most if they left.

If you’re appointing at CHRO or people-director level and want someone who’ll command the room, not just sit in it, that’s a conversation we have most weeks. Get in touch with James Cumming at re:find.

 

How the Employment Rights Act Changes Your Next Senior HR Hire

Written by

The Employment Rights Act is the biggest shake-up in UK employment law for a generation, and plenty has already been written about what it does. The more useful question, if you are hiring senior HR, is what it means for the person you put in charge of handling it. The first wave of changes landed in April 2026, the heavier ones arrive in 2027, and between them they change what a good senior HR leader actually needs to be able to do.

The brief you wrote eighteen months ago may now be pointing at the wrong strengths. Here is what each of the main changes means, and where we would push harder in a search.

Day-one family leave

From April 2026, paternity leave and unpaid parental leave became day-one rights, with no qualifying service. It sounds like an administrative tweak, but it lands across policy, manager guidance, template documents and workforce planning at once, and it is HR that has to make it run. A senior HR leader who is long on strategy and short on operational grip will feel that quickly, usually in the small failures that follow when nobody owns the detail: a missed notice period, cover that was never arranged, a new parent given the wrong steer by a manager no one briefed. Cheap to get right, and expensive to leave to chance.

Statutory sick pay from day one

Statutory sick pay changed on the same date, tt is now paid from the first day of absence rather than the fourth, and the lower earnings limit has gone, bringing lower-paid staff who were previously excluded into scope. That is modest on paper and broad in practice, reaching everyone from the first morning they are off, and across a large or shift-heavy workforce the cost and the absence-management load are real. The person you hire has to see all of it, the operational ripple, the cost line, the systems that track it and the finance conversation that follows, because senior HR is a commercial job and the leaders who thrive in it carry the people case and the numbers together.

The doubled collective redundancy award

This is the change that matters most for a senior HR hire, and the one most likely to catch out a weak appointment. From April 2026, the maximum protective award for failing to consult properly on a collective redundancy doubled from 90 to 180 days’ pay per affected employee. Because it is calculated per head, the exposure on any sizeable restructure can reach seven figures: a programme affecting thirty people can jump from around £185,000 to £370,000 on process alone.

Restructuring risk has doubled overnight, and it sits precisely where employee relations depth lives. A CPO who shines on culture, talent and employer brand but is thin on collective consultation is now a real liability, because getting a collective redundancy wrong has never cost more. If you are hiring senior HR into a business that might restructure, employee relations is no longer a nice-to-have on the brief; it is near the top of it. It is also easy to test: ask a candidate to walk you through the last collective consultation they ran, and within minutes you will know whether they have done it for real or only read about it.

What is coming in 2027

The Employment Rights Act saves its heaviest changes for 2027. From January the qualifying period for unfair dismissal falls from two years to six months, and the cap on unfair dismissal compensation goes altogether. Today that cap is the lower of £118,223 or a year’s pay; for a departing director on a large package that is closer to a floor than a ceiling, and once it is gone the awards for senior, high earners are effectively uncapped. That changes the arithmetic of every senior exit.

Two things follow for hiring. Anyone you appoint from the middle of 2026 will have unfair dismissal protection from January 2027, so probation and early performance management have to be done properly from the start rather than patched together later. And the senior HR leader you bring in now is the one who has to build that discipline before the deadline, the documentation, the manager training, the hard conversations had early rather than late. The businesses that come through 2027 well will be the ones that used 2026 to prepare rather than to catch their breath.

What to weight in a search now

None of this pushes culture, transformation and talent aside. They are still the core of a strong senior HR leader, and the best people carry them alongside everything else. But the Employment Rights Act has shifted the balance. Employment-law literacy and genuine employee-relations strength have moved from useful to essential, and the readiness to challenge the business on process, and to slow it down when consultation demands it, is now part of the job at the top. The strategic HR leader is still the goal; the difference is that the version who can also steer through a tightening legal landscape, and who builds process discipline by instinct, is worth considerably more than the one who cannot.

So be honest, as you write the brief, about which of these your shortlist can actually show. A polished strategic narrative interviews well. Harder to test, and far more useful right now, is whether someone has genuinely run a difficult restructure, held their nerve through a process, and can talk about employment law as fluently as they talk about employer brand. That is what we dig into on your behalf.

If you are making a senior HR hire in this climate and want a straight read on whether a candidate has the employee relations and employment-law depth the next two years will demand, that is a conversation we have most weeks. Get in touch with James Cumming at re:find. One caveat, plainly: this is general comment on the hiring market, not legal advice, so take proper advice on how the Act applies to you.

 

What the Strongest New CPOs Do in Their First 90 Days, and What We Hear When It Goes Wrong

Written by

A few months ago we wrote about why the first 90 days define a chief people officer. This is the other half of that story. We place a lot of these leaders and we stay close to them afterwards, so we hear how it actually went once the welcome emails have stopped and the real work has started. Six months in, the gap between the CPOs who are flying and the ones who are quietly struggling almost always traces back to how they spent that first quarter.

It matters more than it should, because the role does not give a chief people officer much time. Leadership at the top is turning over faster than it used to, and the Josh Bersin Company puts average CHRO tenure at under five years. A leader coming in from outside typically needs six to twelve months just to read a culture properly, and for a first-time CPO the climb is steeper still, so the first 90 days go on building an understanding you do not yet have, while everyone around you expects answers you are not quite ready to give. Here is what we hear from the ones who get that balance wrong, and from the ones who get it right.

Where the first 90 days go wrong

By far the most common regret we hear is moving too fast on culture. A new CPO arrives with a mandate to change things and feels the pressure to show impact early, so the restructure or the new values land before anyone has been won round, and the place reacts the way a body reacts to a foreign object. Six months on, they are unpicking the damage and rebuilding trust they spent in week three. When we ask what they would do differently, the answer is nearly always some version of the same thing: spend the first month asking questions, not making statements.

Others retreat into HR’s comfort zone, under pressure people go back to what they know, the policy refresh and the engagement survey, and it feels like progress because it is visible. The trouble is that it is not what the chief executive hired them for, and it quietly confirms the old suspicion that HR is a support act rather than a partner at the table. We watch capable people spend a first quarter perfecting the people plan and a second quarter realising they had never really built the relationship with the CFO. It is seldom a shortage of ability; it is a reflex, and under pressure the reflex wins.

And a good number simply try to carry all of it at once. A new CPO wants to be useful, says yes to everything, and arrives at month three with forty priorities, no team built and no real plan. It reads as energy for a while, and then it reads as drift. By month six it looks like firefighting, and the CEO starts to wonder whether the appointment was right, when the real problem was only ever a lack of focus.

 

Refind blog size 3

 

What the strong ones do instead

The ones who land well do close to the opposite, and it starts with diagnosis. They treat the opening weeks as a listening exercise, getting under the numbers and the commercial pressure and forming a real view of the culture before they touch it. From outside it can look slow, and the good ones are comfortable with that, because a decision taken in week ten, once they understand the place, is worth far more than a confident one taken in week two. The Josh Bersin Company’s research points the same way: the leaders who last embed change into how the business actually runs, instead of launching it as an initiative.

They also put the relationships at the top first, the chief executive and the CFO above all. Early on they get the mandate spelled out rather than guessed at, so they know what they are really being asked to fix and what success looks like to the people who will judge them. A surprising number of the CPOs who struggle never had that conversation, and spent a year delivering beautifully against the wrong brief. The CFO relationship is usually the one left too late, and the one that repays the most attention, because a CPO who can talk about the people agenda in terms of cost and risk earns a very different hearing at the top table.

And they are ruthless about focus. They pick two or three things that genuinely matter, get something visible done on at least one of them inside the quarter, and use that early credibility to buy room for the slower work that follows. They build their team from the start too, because they cannot carry it alone, and because the people they inherit will decide whether any of the strategy actually happens. Trying to be excellent at everything is how a lot of capable CPOs end up trusted with very little.

Setting a new CPO up to succeed

If you are stepping into one of these roles, the lesson from the people who did it well is to resist the urge to prove yourself through sheer activity. Use the first weeks to understand the business and the culture and to get the mandate straight with your chief executive, keep your priorities few, and build your team sooner than feels necessary. The instinct to change everything quickly is the one to keep in check.

And if you are the chief executive or board bringing a first-time CPO in, a fair amount of this sits with you. Spell the mandate out rather than leaving them to infer it, give them real sponsorship through the first quarter rather than a warm welcome and silence, and do not expect the culture fixed in the first 90 days, because the research and our own experience both say that reading it properly takes far longer. The best new CPO appointments we see are the ones where the business was as deliberate about the first quarter as the candidate was.

If you are hiring a chief people officer, or about to step into the role yourself, and you want a candid view of what the first quarter should look like, that is a conversation we have most weeks. Get in touch with James Cumming at re:find.

What Our 2026 HR Salary Survey Reveals About the Gap Inside HR

Written by

Ask most HR leaders where the biggest pay gap in their function sits and they point outward, to the distance between HR and the commercial side. Our latest benchmarks say they’re looking the wrong way. The widest pay gap in HR is now inside HR.

We surveyed specialists across nine Centres of Expertise for our 2026 HR Centres of Expertise Report. One finding stood out. Two people at the same level can sit a full tier apart on pay, purely because of the specialism they chose. Where you specialise now shapes your earning power as much as how senior you are.

Access the report here: HR Centres of Expertise Report

What the benchmarks reveal

At the top, the strategic specialisms pull away. 57% of HR Transformation specialists earn over £80k, and half of those in Reward and OD do the same. Individual Reward and Transformation specialists reach the £150–200k band, with OD extending to £120–150k. That £150–200k figure is where our data stops, not where the market does. The most senior Reward and Transformation leaders sit well beyond it.

What makes the spread so wide is the bottom. The operational specialisms cluster in the £40–60k band: 85% of Talent Acquisition specialists, 76% in Employee Relations, 61% in HR Operations. So the pay spread inside HR is now wider than the gap between many HR functions and their commercial counterparts.

The strategic specialisms drew smaller samples, so treat the exact figures as indicative. But the direction holds across our data and the wider market, and it isn’t subtle.

The retention risk you’re probably not pricing in

Here’s the part that should worry anyone building a team. The operational functions aren’t just the lowest paid. They’re also the most pay-sensitive and the most mobile. When we asked what would make people move, pay topped the list for exactly these functions: 73% in HR Operations, 76% in Talent Acquisition, 86% in Employee Relations.

So you’ve got a group sitting at the bottom of the pay band, in the part of the market where a competing offer is easiest to make, telling you plainly that pay is what would move them. That’s a flight risk hiding inside healthy engagement numbers: 62% of specialists feel confident about progressing their career, yet 73% would move for better pay. Confidence and pay satisfaction have come apart, and that gap won’t show up in your engagement survey.

 

Refind blog size (6)

 

It runs deeper than base pay

The rest of the reward structure follows the same fault line. Bonus and long-term incentives track the pay divide closely. Employee Relations has the highest no-bonus rate of any Centre of Expertise, and across the survey around four in five specialists receive no long-term incentive at all. Benefits lean the same way, with ER again reporting the highest “no benefits” rate.

The wider market says the same. CIPD’s February 2026 reward survey found flexible working is rated a key driver by three-quarters of employers who set benefit objectives, yet only 40% actually provide it, and benefits are usually aimed at retention without ever being measured against it. The lever most likely to hold an operational specialist is often the one that never makes it onto the table.

ONS figures show regular pay grew 3.4% in the year to spring 2026, barely 0.1% once you adjust for inflation. When the annual rise only just beats inflation, a competitive package is the price of entry, not a differentiator. Where someone sits in the structure now matters more than the size of their yearly bump.

What to do about it

None of this is expensive.

Compare pay inside HR, not just against the outside market. Two people on the same level aren’t always worth the same salary. A Reward Director and an ER lead are paid very differently across the market, so putting them in the same internal band underpays one of them, usually the one who’s hardest to replace. Underpay them long enough and you lose them.

Give people a way to move sideways. For someone in an operational team, switching into a strategic specialism can raise their pay more than the next promotion would. If they can’t make that move with you, they’ll make it with someone else.

Look at where your Director-level pay lands. The strategic specialisms show the clearest routes past £100k at Director level; the operational ones climb toward six figures from a much lower base. Two people who started level can end a tier apart by the time they run a function. If your Director bands don’t reflect that, you’ll lose the harder role to replace.

Offer each team what actually matters to them. Operational teams are moved mainly by pay. Strategic specialists care more about culture, good leadership and a real say in strategy. Treat the whole function the same way and you’ll overpay some people and still lose others.

Where this leaves you

Where someone specialises is now a long-term pay and retention decision. The functions doing some of the most operationally complex work are often the most exposed, and this gap is widening, not closing.

If you’re benchmarking pay across your HR team, designing a Centre of Expertise, or trying to keep specialists you can’t afford to lose, that’s a conversation we have most weeks. Read the full HR Centres of Expertise Report here, or get in touch with James Cumming at re:find.