Leadership Recruiting Fundamentals
Why Leadership Searches Fail — and How to Avoid It
By Mark Jones
Founder & Managing Director
Introduction
A leadership search can go wrong long before anyone realizes it is in trouble.
The position gets approved. A job description is written. Recruiters start contacting candidates. Résumés begin circulating.
Then the search stalls.
The candidates aren’t quite right. The hiring team can’t agree on who should move forward. Strong candidates lose interest. Compensation becomes an issue late in the process. Or after months of interviewing, the company hires someone who was available rather than someone who was truly right for the role.
When that happens, it’s easy to conclude that there simply weren’t enough good candidates.
Sometimes that's true.
But many leadership searches fail for reasons that have little to do with the number of qualified people in the market.
The problems often start with how the leadership recruiting process was defined, how candidates were approached, or how decisions were made once good candidates entered the process.
At a Glance
Leadership searches most often run into trouble when:
- The company hasn’t clearly defined what the new leader needs to accomplish.
- The candidate profile includes too many requirements and too few real priorities.
- The search relies too heavily on people who are actively looking for a job.
- The opportunity isn’t compelling enough to attract successful passive candidates.
- Interviewers aren’t aligned on what they’re evaluating.
- The hiring process moves too slowly.
- The company keeps waiting for a “perfect” candidate.
- Compensation expectations aren’t addressed early enough.
- Communication and momentum disappear near the offer stage.
Most of these problems are preventable. The key is recognizing that a leadership search isn’t simply about finding qualified candidates. It’s about creating a process that can identify, attract, evaluate and ultimately hire the right one.
The Company Hasn’t Really Defined What It Needs
This is one of the most common problems in leadership recruiting.
A company may have a detailed job description and still not have a clear picture of the person it needs to hire.
Consider a company looking for a VP of Sales. What problem does that person actually need to solve?
Is the company building a sales organization from scratch? Replacing an underperforming leader? Moving into larger accounts? Bringing discipline to an entrepreneurial sales team? Preparing for rapid growth or a transaction?
Those situations may all require a VP of Sales, but they don’t require the same VP of Sales.
Before a leadership search begins, I like to get beyond the responsibilities listed in the job description and understand something much more important:
What needs to be different 12 to 18 months after this person joins the company?
That answer tells you far more about who you should recruit.
The Candidate Profile is Too Restrictive
Leadership searches often begin with a wish list.
The candidate needs experience in the exact industry. A certain number of years at a particular level. Experience managing a specific team size. Exposure to certain systems. A particular educational background. Maybe experience with companies within a narrow revenue range.
Individually, each requirement can sound reasonable.
Put them all together and the company may have defined a candidate who barely exists.
This is where priorities matter.
Which requirements are truly necessary for the person to succeed? Which would be helpful? Which are simply based on what the previous person had?
A good search should challenge those assumptions early.
If the market keeps producing strong leaders who miss one item on the original list, the answer isn’t always to keep searching. Sometimes the candidate specification needs another look.
The Search Focuses Only on Candidates Who Are Looking
Some of the best leadership candidates aren’t looking for another job.
They’re doing well. Their company values them. They’re compensated appropriately. They may have no reason to spend time browsing job postings or talking with recruiters.
That doesn’t mean they won’t consider another opportunity.
It means the opportunity has to come to them.
This is one of the biggest differences between leadership recruiting and filling positions where a strong pool of active applicants may already exist.
If a company evaluates only people who applied, it sees the candidates who decided to enter the market. It doesn’t necessarily see the people it would most want to hire.
A serious leadership search has to reach into the passive candidate market.
The Opportunity Isn’t Compelling Enough
Recruiters sometimes have to deliver an uncomfortable message to a hiring manager:
The candidate isn’t sold yet.
Companies naturally focus on evaluating candidates. But strong candidates are conducting their own evaluation at exactly the same time.
And passive candidates have an advantage that is easy to overlook—they can simply stay where they are.
That’s why a leadership opportunity has to be more than a job description.
Why is the position open? What does the company need this person to change? What authority will the new leader have? What is the relationship with the CEO or ownership team? What could someone accomplish here that might not be possible in the person’s current role?
That’s the story a strong candidate needs to hear.
Compensation matters, but compensation alone rarely turns a successful passive executive into an enthusiastic candidate.
The Hiring Team Isn’t Aligned
Misalignment among interviewers can derail an otherwise good search.
One executive wants a strategic leader. Another wants a hands-on operator. The CEO wants someone who will change things. Another member of the leadership team wants someone who will fit comfortably into the way things already operate.
Then the interviews begin.
A candidate one interviewer considers outstanding gets rejected by another for being “too strategic” or “not strategic enough.”
The problem may not be the candidate.
The hiring team never agreed on what it was looking for.
Before interviewing starts, everyone involved should understand the outcomes expected from the new leader, the capabilities that matter most and the areas where the company is willing to compromise.
Without that alignment, each interviewer tends to create a different definition of the ideal candidate.
The Interview Process Takes Too Long
Leadership hiring should be thoughtful. It doesn’t need to be slow.
There’s a difference.
Strong candidates have demanding jobs. They may also be talking with other companies. Passive candidates are particularly vulnerable to losing interest because they weren’t planning to make a move in the first place.
A week passes between interviews. Then another executive needs to meet the candidate. Scheduling takes another ten days. Someone goes on vacation.
By the time the company is ready to make a decision, the candidate’s enthusiasm has changed, or another company has moved faster.
I’ve seen hiring teams become most interested in a candidate at almost exactly the point when the candidate begins losing interest in them.
Speed isn’t about rushing the decision. It’s about maintaining momentum.
The Company Keeps Looking for Someone Better
A strong candidate makes it through the interview process. The hiring team likes the person.
Then someone asks:
“Should we see a few more?”
Sometimes the answer should be yes.
But sometimes the company is searching for certainty that doesn’t exist.
Every leadership candidate comes with tradeoffs. One may have deeper industry experience. Another may have built a stronger team. Another may be better at transformation. Another may be a much stronger fit for the company’s current stage.
The objective isn’t to find a candidate with no weaknesses.
It’s to determine which candidate has the strongest combination of experience, capability, motivation and fit for the situation the company actually has.
Waiting for a hypothetical perfect candidate can result in losing the very good candidate already sitting in front of you.
Compensation Is Addressed Too Late
Compensation problems shouldn’t first appear at the offer stage.
The company and candidate don’t need to negotiate an offer during the first conversation, but both sides should understand whether there is a realistic path to an agreement.
For leadership candidates, that discussion can extend beyond base salary.
Annual incentives, long-term incentives, equity, benefits, flexibility, title, reporting relationships and future opportunity may all factor into the decision.
Then there is the counteroffer.
When a strong leader resigns, the current employer may suddenly find additional compensation, a promotion or expanded responsibilities.
That’s why understanding a candidate’s motivation throughout the recruiting process matters so much.
If the candidate is moving primarily for more money, a counteroffer can become very powerful.
If the candidate is moving toward a better opportunity, broader responsibility or something that can’t be fixed by the current employer, the situation is different.
A Recruiter's Perspective
One of the things leadership recruiting teaches you quickly is that finding qualified candidates is only part of the job.
I’ve worked searches where the candidate market was strong, yet the search became difficult because the hiring team kept changing the profile. I’ve seen good candidates cool off while companies worked through internal decisions. And I’ve seen candidates who appeared ready to accept suddenly face a substantial counteroffer from an employer that didn’t want to lose them.
Those situations change how I approach a search.
I want to know early what the company truly needs versus what would simply be nice to have. I want to understand what would cause a passive candidate to leave a good job for this one. And as candidates move through the process, I’m paying attention to their level of interest, concerns, competing opportunities and reasons for considering a change.
A recruiter shouldn’t simply keep sending résumés until someone gets hired.
Part of the value is recognizing where a search is beginning to get off track and addressing it before the best candidates disappear.
For companies trying to decide whether a difficult search has reached that point, it may also be worth considering when to use a leadership recruiting firm rather than continuing the search internally.
The Search Loses Momentum at the Finish Line
Identifying the right candidate isn’t the end of a leadership search.
You still have to hire the person.
Once the company has decided whom it wants, communication becomes even more important. Questions need answers. Concerns need to surface. References, approvals and compensation discussions need to keep moving.
Silence at this stage creates room for doubt.
It also gives the candidate’s current employer time to react.
This is another reason recruiters need to stay close to candidates throughout the process rather than reappearing when it’s time to present an offer.
The conversation you want before the offer is simple:
If the company makes the offer we’ve discussed, is there anything that would prevent you from accepting it?
It’s much better to discover an issue then than after the written offer has been delivered.
The Cost of a Failed Leadership Search
The obvious cost of a failed search is the time spent recruiting and interviewing.
The larger cost is usually the position remaining open.
Decisions get delayed. Other executives absorb responsibilities that aren’t theirs. Teams operate without the leadership they need. Growth initiatives slow down. Problems the new leader was supposed to address continue.
A bad hire is even more expensive.
The company can lose six months or a year before acknowledging that the hire isn’t working. Then the position opens again and the search starts over.
That’s why the most important question at the beginning of a leadership search isn’t:
“How quickly can we find candidates?”
It’s:
“What does this business need from its next leader, and how will we recognize that person when we find them?”
Answer that clearly at the beginning, keep the hiring team aligned, engage the right candidate market and maintain momentum through the offer.
You’ll eliminate many of the reasons leadership searches fail in the first place.
Continue Learning
Explore our core guides to leadership recruiting, the search process, and choosing the right recruiting partner.
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