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.