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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

 

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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

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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.

 

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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.

What Separates the HR Director Who Steps Up to CPO From the One Who Almost Does

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What Separates the HR Director Who Steps Up to CPO From the One Who Almost Does

 

The distance between a strong HR Director and a chief people officer is smaller than it looks, and it has very little to do with years served. We have interviewed a lot of people for these roles, and the ones who make the leap and the ones who almost do are usually separated by only a handful of things. They are not subtle once you know what to look for, and they tend to show up inside the first twenty minutes of a conversation.

It is worth getting this right, because the move is genuinely high-stakes. Research cited by McKinsey finds that two years on, between 27% and 46% of executive transitions are judged failures or disappointments. A first-time CPO appointment that does not work costs the business a year, costs the individual a great deal more, and is usually avoidable. So here is what we see in the people who are ready for the move, and in the ones who are not quite there. It amounts, in the end, to what stepping up to CPO actually takes. Read it as a candidate asking whether it is your time, or as a board weighing whether to promote from within.

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They talk about the business, not the function

The clearest signal comes early, in how someone describes their own work. The candidate who is ready talks about the business first: what the company is trying to achieve, where the commercial pressure sits, how the people agenda moves the numbers. The one who is not yet ready talks about HR: the frameworks they introduced, the processes they tidied up, the engagement score that went up. Both may have done excellent work. But the top people role is a business seat that happens to be filled by an HR leader, and the people who thrive in it think like the chief executive sitting beside them, not like the head of a function reporting in.

They have owned a hard decision

There is a real difference between being in the room when a difficult call is made and being the person who has to make it and then live with it. Plenty of candidates describe restructures, senior exits and contentious pay decisions they were close to. The question we are really asking is whether they owned any of them. The HR Director to CPO move is, in large part, the move from trusted advisor to accountable decision-maker, and it is a bigger jump than most people expect. The ones who are ready have carried the weight of a decision that upset people, and have not flinched from it afterwards. You can usually hear it in the detail. They talk about the individuals affected, the conversations they had personally, and what they would do differently next time. The ones who only advised tend to drift into the passive voice, where decisions were taken and changes were made, with no clear hand on any of it.

They can manage the CEO and the board

A chief people officer spends as much energy managing upwards and sideways as managing the function beneath them. The people who are ready talk about the chief executive as a peer they challenge and influence, and about the board as an audience they have learned to read. The ones who are not quite there talk about the CEO as someone they deliver for. Delivery is a fine quality in an HR Director. It is not enough at the top, where part of the job is to tell the chief executive the thing nobody else will, and to do it in a way that lands.

They have built something, not only run something

Boards appointing a first-time CPO want evidence that the person can build under pressure, not simply keep a working function working. The candidates who stand out have led something genuinely new: an operating-model change, a post-deal integration, a function stood up from very little. The ones who almost get there have run a mature, stable team very well, which matters, but it tells you less about how they behave when the ground is moving and there is no template to follow. CPO readiness is, more than anything else, evidence of having built and changed things rather than only maintained them. Inheriting a good function and keeping it good is a real skill, but it is a different one. Building forces hard choices about priorities, sequence and where to spend limited credibility, and those choices are exactly what a board is trying to read.

They are honest about what they do not know

This one tends to surprise people. The candidates who are ready are usually the most candid about their gaps. They will say plainly that they have never led a major acquisition, or that reward is not their strongest area, and they will have a clear view of how they would cover it. The ones who are not quite ready claim the full breadth and then come unstuck under a few specific questions. At this level, self-awareness reads as seniority. Bluffing reads as someone not yet ready to be the final word in the room, because the final word has to know where its own edges are.

They have stopped needing to be the expert

The last pattern is about identity. Strong HR Directors are often the most technically capable person in their team, and a good deal of their confidence comes from that. The step up asks them to give it up. A chief people officer leads specialists who are better than they are at reward, at talent, at employee relations, and the job is to orchestrate that, not to out-expert it. The candidates who are ready are comfortable being the least expert person in a conversation and the most accountable one at the same time. The ones who are not still want to be the cleverest voice on the detail, and it quietly holds them, and their team, back.

Where this leaves both sides

For anyone weighing the step up to CPO, the useful news is that none of this is about charisma or pedigree. It is a set of behaviours you can build on purpose: by getting closer to the commercial side of your business, by owning decisions instead of advising on them, and by building something before you are asked to. If you can point to those honestly, you are closer than you think. If you cannot yet, that is a development plan rather than a verdict on your CPO readiness.

For boards and chief executives, the message is simpler. An internal step up to CPO can be the best appointment you make, cheaper, faster and far less risky than an external search, but only when these signals are genuinely present, not assumed because someone has been loyal and capable for a long time. Competence in the current role is not the same as readiness for the next one, and the cost of confusing the two is high. The best internal appointments we see are the ones where the board was honest with itself about which of these signals were already there and which still needed building, and then gave the person the time and backing to close the gap. 

If you are weighing an internal promotion, or want a candid read on whether someone is ready, that is a conversation we have most weeks. Get in touch with James Cumming at re:find.

What We Hear in CHRO Interviews That You’ll Never Hear in an Exit Interview

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What We Hear in CHRO Interviews That You’ll Never Hear in an Exit Interview

 

When a senior HR leader resigns, the exit interview rarely captures why. What goes on file is familiar and tells you nothing. A better opportunity came up. The timing was right. They were ready for something new.

The real reason usually surfaces later, mid-search, often a year on. With no current employer in the room and nothing left to protect, senior people are honest about what happened, and it seldom matches what they said on the way out. Work Institute’s latest analysis points the same way: most turnover is preventable, and lack of career growth drives it more than pay.

After twenty years of these conversations, the same patterns keep coming up. Here is what we hear about why CHROs leave, and what each one says about the business behind it.

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“I wasn’t in the room”

This is about access to decisions, not pay. A CHRO can hold the title, sit on the executive team on paper, and still be shut out of the choices that shape the business. We hear about being asked to present their section and leave before the decision is taken, or finding out about a restructure or acquisition at the same time as everyone else rather than helping to shape it.

The exit interview records a move for a broader remit. The reality is that the seniority was genuine but the influence never came with it. These are businesses that appoint a strategic HR leader and then use them to run operations.

“The CEO and I never recovered from one moment”

Senior HR tenures often rest on a single relationship. We hear about the decision overturned in front of the executive team, the promise never kept, the moment the chief executive publicly backed someone else. None of it is written down. People at this level are far too careful for that. But it is often where the leaving began, months before any resignation.

When HR’s standing depends entirely on the goodwill of one person, one bad moment can end a career there.

“I could see the ceiling”

Many of the people we speak to were not unhappy. They had simply reached the limit of the role. No larger remit ahead, and no sign the organisation had thought about their next move. The exit interview puts it down to personal reasons. It points to a business that plans succession for every senior role except the one responsible for succession.

“I was carrying the culture on my own”

There is real fatigue behind this one. The leader was made responsible for culture and engagement, and held to account for both, while the people around them behaved in ways that pulled the other way. Eventually they stopped believing the words they were being asked to defend.

On the form it becomes work-life balance. In practice it describes a business that handed its culture to HR and never stood behind it.

“They only recognised my value once I resigned”

The counter-offer gives it away. Time and again, the recognition, the pay review and the seat at the table all arrive within a week of the resignation, and never before it. By then it reads as confirmation, long after it could have changed anything. The relationship had been reactive throughout, and the leadership had mistaken a quiet senior leader for a contented one.

What it adds up to

Across all of these, the same issue surfaces: timing. Every one of these reasons existed well before the resignation, which is part of what makes senior HR turnover so hard to predict, and none of them came up in the one process built to catch them.

That is the real limit of exit interviews at this level. By the time a departing leader is willing to be straight with you, they have already left, and they tend to tell someone like us instead. It is also why CHROs leave businesses that look, from the outside, completely stable.

CHRO retention starts long before any of this. It means paying attention to what is visible months earlier: who is actually in the room when decisions get made, and who only hears they are valued once they have resigned.

If you are appointing at this level, or trying to keep a leader you cannot afford to lose, it is a conversation we have often. Get in touch with James Cumming at re:find.

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How Long Does Executive Search Take? And What Affects the Timeline?

This is probably the question we get asked more than any other. And the honest answer isn’t a single number, it depends on a handful of variables that we’ve got pretty good at predicting over 20 years of running these searches.

Here’s what the timeline actually looks like, and what tends to push it in either direction.

The Typical Timeline

For most senior leadership roles at Director level or above, here’s how it tends to break down:

Stage Typical Duration
Brief and research 1–2 weeks
Direct outreach and screening 2–4 weeks
Shortlist presentation 1 week
Interviews (2–3 stages) 2–4 weeks
Offer to acceptance 1–2 weeks
Brief to accepted offer (total) 8–12 weeks
Notice period (Director level) 3–6 months
Brief to start date (typical) 5–8 months

The bit that catches most clients off guard is the gap between offer accepted and first day. A CPO on a six-month notice period who accepts an offer in January won’t be in the building until July. We flag this early because it affects how and when you start the process.

 

What Tends to Speed Things Up

A tight, well-thought-through brief

When we know exactly what we’re looking for, the culture, the leadership context, the things that would be a deal-breaker, we typically reach shortlist two to three weeks faster than on briefs that are still evolving mid-search. It sounds obvious, but this is where most delays actually start.

Quick decisions on your side

The most common reason we lose a strong candidate isn’t that someone else offered more money. It’s that the process moved too slowly. Senior people at this level are usually talking to more than one organisation. Keeping momentum, interviews within two weeks of each other, makes a real difference.

A broad talent pool

For generalist HR Director roles, there are plenty of people to approach and we usually have good responses within a week or two. The more specialist the brief, the longer that takes. Reward Directors in financial services, or people with specific HR technology transformation experience, are a much smaller group.

Compensation that reflects the market

This is about not going in low and then trying to negotiate up. Searches where the package is at or above market rate close at offer stage noticeably faster, usually two to three weeks, than those where candidates receive an offer below what they’re currently earning.

 

What Tends to Slow Things Down

A very specific or niche brief

The more precise the requirement, the smaller the pool. A search for a Group HR Director with M&A integration experience in a regulated sector might have 15 to 20 realistic candidates nationally. We’ll find them, but it takes longer and there’s less room for attrition.

Multiple stakeholders in the sign-off chain

When a CEO, a board, and a private equity investor all need to be aligned before an offer goes out, it adds time. Not because anyone is being awkward, but because getting diaries aligned and decisions made across three parties just takes longer. We’ve seen this add two to four weeks at offer stage alone.

Location requirements

Roles that need someone fully office-based in a regional location take longer than hybrid or remote-friendly roles. The pool is smaller, and any relocation conversation adds another layer of complexity.

Long notice periods

This one is largely out of everyone’s hands. At Director level, three months is standard. At CPO or Group HR Director level, six months is common. We’ve seen 12-month clauses at the most senior end. It doesn’t affect how long the search takes, but it significantly affects when the person actually starts.

 

What About Interim?

Most senior interim appointments at Head of or Director level complete within two to three weeks of us taking the brief. Notice periods are short, often immediate or two weeks, and the candidates are, by definition, available.

The trade-off is that good interim people move quickly. If you’re considering an interim appointment, sitting on the shortlist for a week usually means losing your first choice.

 

Can You Speed Up a Permanent Search?

Yes, within limits. When there’s a genuine reason for urgency, an unexpected departure, or a hard deadline, we run outreach and screening in parallel rather than sequentially. That typically gets us to shortlist in three to four weeks rather than five to six.

It works best when the brief is clear and the client is ready to interview quickly. If the brief is still being refined or key decision-makers aren’t available, accelerating the front end of the process doesn’t actually help.

If you want a straight answer on what a specific search would realistically take, we’re happy to talk it through before you’ve made any decisions. We’d rather give you an honest view upfront than an optimistic one that doesn’t hold.

Get in touch at refind.co.uk or connect with James Cumming on LinkedIn.

Why the first 90 days define a chief people officer

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You have the title. Now you need the trust. The first three months decide whether you become a strategic partner or a well-paid firefighter. Get the early moments right and you earn permission to shape strategy. Misstep and you spend the next year repairing credibility.

What to focus on in Weeks 1–12
1) Build the right relationships

Map your stakeholders. Start with the CEO, CFO, and your P&L leaders. Book one-to-ones with clear questions: what outcomes matter most, where do people issues block delivery, and what would good look like by quarter-end? Share how you will communicate progress and how you want to be challenged.

Prioritise time with your HR leadership team. Clarify decision rights, set operating rhythms, and agree your principles for pace and trade-offs. This creates space to work on organisational development, not just firefighting.

2) Diagnose organisational health before changing anything big

Run a fast audit: structure, costs, tech, policies, skills, and key metrics. Observe the unwritten rules. Identify the few hotspots where small fixes unlock visible value, then pick one thin-slice improvement you can deliver in weeks. Use this to demonstrate you can drive workforce transformation without drama.

3) Align people priorities to business goals

Publish a one-page plan that links people bets to revenue, margin, risk, and customer outcomes. Keep it to three priorities, for example: sharpen frontline hiring quality, reduce regretted attrition, and accelerate manager capability. Tie each to a measurable result and an executive sponsor. This is how organisational development becomes business strategy, not a set of HR projects.

Common mistakes that undermine credibility
  • Moving too fast without context
    Big restructures in Month 1 burn trust. Spend time listening, then act with precision.
  • Trying to fix everything at once
    Your remit is broad. Focus on three outcomes that matter and say no to the rest.
  • Underestimating the political landscape
    Learn who really decides, how trade-offs get made, and where past initiatives stalled.
  • Neglecting your own team
    If your direct reports lack clarity, your plan will stall. Calibrate roles, stretch goals, and support early.
  • Confusing activity with impact
    Publish a scorecard that connects your work to business metrics. Share progress regularly.
What great looks like in the first 90 days
  • Built influence through proof, not promises
    A new CPO in a multi-site services company fixed offer-to-start leakage in one region within six weeks. They shortened time-to-start and freed managers to focus on trading. Credibility followed.
  • Turned listening into action
    A CPO joining a regulated utility ran a structured stakeholder tour, then launched a pilot capability map tied to critical programmes. This made resource gaps explicit and prioritised hiring, coaching, and talent acquisition activity.
  • Linked people bets to financials
    A healthcare CPO partnered with the COO to reduce agency reliance in two hotspots. They redesigned rota rules and manager incentives. Early savings created headroom to fund learning for supervisors, momentum that enabled wider workforce transformation.
A practical 30‑60‑90 roadmap

Days 1–30: Listen & learn

  • Clarify success measures with the CEO and chair of RemCo.
  • Run a structured stakeholder tour and a fast HR function audit.
  • Publish a weekly note: what you’re learning, what you’ve paused, and where you will test improvements.

Days 31–60: Shape & align

  • Agree three priorities and owners.
  • Deliver one visible early win (policy bottleneck, onboarding defect, or manager training gap).
  • Draft a 12‑month people plan that integrates organisational development, employee experience, tech, and talent acquisition.

Days 61–90: Deliver & embed

  • Launch at least one strategic initiative with a named sponsor and KPIs.
  • Stand up governance: sprint rhythms, budget tracking, and a monthly business review with P&L leaders.
  • Share wins across the company and credit contributors to build followership.
Your first team decisions

Assess the capability of your HR leadership team honestly. Where you have gaps, decide whether to coach, rotate, or hire. If you need external support, use talent acquisition and an interim option only where it accelerates delivery against your three priorities. Protect time each week to meet high-potential HR managers and future successors. This compounds your impact on organisational development.

Steal these conversation openers
  • “If we could only fix one people issue this quarter, which one would release the most value?”
  • “Where did previous change efforts stall, and why?”
  • “What evidence would prove the people plan is working by month three?”

We’ve put together a concise First 90 Days guide with tools you can use immediately: a stakeholder‑mapping template, a 25‑question diagnostic, a cultural health checklist, an HR strategy one‑pager, and a comms plan outline. 

If you’d like a copy, email James at james@refind.co.uk and he’ll send it to you. It’s a practical companion for your first quarter and a useful refresher for seasoned CPOs.

Your next chief people officer probably won’t come from your competitor

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If your HR succession plan starts and ends with “find someone from our sector”, you narrow the field and invite safe, average outcomes. Familiar CVs feel low risk. They also recycle the same formula and stall progress in the people function.

Sector bias looks sensible, but it breeds stagnation

Insisting on “must have sector X” shrinks choice and overprices familiarity. You may get someone fluent in your jargon and constraints. You will not get fresh thinking on workforce design, skills, or employee experience.

Cross-sector leaders bring pattern recognition your market rarely develops. They question old policies, convert insight from other industries into practical wins, and reset expectations for pace and measurement.

Why your next CPO should be a cross-sector hire

New answers to old problems

Leaders from consumer-scale businesses bring product-style journey design, test-and-learn EVP work, and channel metrics that sharpen people decisions.

Faster change velocity

Veterans of transformation-heavy markets have muscle memory for restructuring, digitisation, and skills-led workforce planning. They do not treat legacy policies as fixed truths.

Better resilience and challenge

Outsiders are less bound by industry lore. With clear governance and support, they propose bolder options and make them real.

Practical steps to widen your CPO talent pool
1) Define outcomes, not biographies

Write three outcomes the new CPO must deliver in the first 12–18 months. Examples: reduce regretted attrition in revenue roles by a set percentage, consolidate HRIS to one instance with adoption targets, and build a usable skills taxonomy. Reverse-engineer the capabilities required. This keeps the brief focused on business impact rather than sector comfort.

2) Use potential-based assessment

Blend track record with stretch signals. Prioritise learning agility, systems thinking, board-level influencing, and evidence of building high-performing teams. Use structured interviews, work samples, and case exercises mapped to your real challenges. Add a calibration panel to separate strong storytellers from genuine operators.

3) Map transferable skills explicitly

Translate between contexts in writing. If you hire from retail into healthcare, compare:

  • Customer to patient or member journeys → experience design, service recovery, queue management.
  • Store or region leadership to multi-site operations → span of control, safety culture, compliance cadence.
  • High-volume hiring to clinical and technical pipelines → funnel analytics, campus strategy, realistic job previews.

Give each finalist a two-column matrix. The left column lists your critical contexts. The right column lists analogous contexts and results from their career.

4) De-risk with interim-to-perm

If the board remains cautious, run a six-month interim mandate with two measurable deliverables and pre-agreed decision rights. This proves culture fit and impact before a permanent offer. It also aligns with your use of executive search partners for speed and quality, while you keep optionality on the permanent move.

5) Lock governance and sponsorship early

Spell out the CPO’s decision rights. Name a senior sponsor with time and conviction. Publish a short scorecard that links people outcomes to customer and financial metrics. Review it in RemCo and at the top table regularly.

What to expect from your search partner

Ask your partner to:

  • Show adjacent sectors and the capabilities they unlock, not just a list of lookalike CVs.
  • Design potential-based selection that travels across sectors.
  • Translate transferable skills into your context with proof.
  • Provide onboarding support and an early wins plan.

A credible partner in executive search should challenge a narrow brief and bring sector-spanning shortlists. They should also advise on how this hire shapes broader board recruitment priorities and the pipeline for c-suite hiring over the next 12–24 months.

A 90-day plan that helps an outsider win
  • Weeks 1–3: Listen, then map moments that matter across the employee lifecycle. Agree success measures with the CEO and RemCo.
  • Weeks 4–6: Launch a thin-slice change in one unit. For example, fix offer-to-start leakage or pilot a skills inventory for mission-critical roles.
  • Weeks 7–9: Publish a one-page people strategy with three measurable bets. Confirm forums, decision rights, and dashboards.
  • Weeks 10–12: Scale the thin-slice. Tie results to customer and financial metrics to earn permanent sponsorship.

 

Ready to break the sector bubble?
If you want a shortlist that goes beyond “our competitor with a different badge”, we will design a search that balances potential and proof, with structured assessment and explicit skills translation. Start a conversation about executive search today. Align your board recruitment and c-suite hiring agenda to the outcomes that matter.