5 Things to Consider Before Your Next Key Hire

Most of the damage in a bad executive hire happens before anyone's interviewed — in the two weeks before the search even opens, when the role gets defined by whoever's desk it's landed on instead of by what the business actually needs. Here's what we make every client answer first.

1. What's the gap, not the title

"We need a VP of Operations" describes an org chart, not a problem. Is the plant running fine operationally but bleeding margin? Is it a scaling problem — the person who got you to $30M can't get you to $100M? Is it a trust problem, where the last three hires didn't survive the culture? Each of those is a different search, with a different profile, even if the title on the req is identical. We won't open a search until we can write the gap in one sentence that isn't the job title.

2. What the market's actually paying this quarter — not last year

Comp bands move faster than most internal benchmarking catches. We're running live searches across manufacturing, PE-backed portfolio companies, energy, and the AI buildout right now, and the bands that looked competitive in Q1 have moved in some of those sectors — sometimes 15-20% on the base, more on the equity structure for PE-backed roles. Anchoring an approved budget to a stale numbers means either the search stalls at final offer, or you win the candidate and lose them in fourteen months to a counter you never had a shot at matching.

3. Confidential or open — and who actually needs to know

A confidential search (replacing someone who doesn't know yet, or one where the board doesn't want signal to competitors or the public markets) runs on a completely different clock and candidate pool than an open one. Deciding this after the search starts costs you the best candidates — the operators worth having are rarely actively looking, and a sloppy confidentiality leak is the fastest way to burn a relationship with someone who was otherwise a strong yes.

4. Whether you're testing for credentials or for execution

A resume proves someone did a job before. It doesn't prove they can do your version of it — under your constraints, with your board, in your growth stage. This is the whole reason our 360° evaluation exists: the diagnostic and talent map get you a shortlist of people who plausibly fit; the behavioral assessment and reference structure are where you find out if they can actually execute against the specific gap from #1. Skipping that step to move faster is the single most common cause of a hire that looks right on paper and doesn't survive month six.

5. Whether the hiring committee agrees on what "great" looks like

The fastest way to lose a strong candidate is an interview loop where three stakeholders are quietly evaluating three different jobs. Get explicit, before the first call: what does this person need to be true about in year one? What trade-off are you willing to make — deep sector experience over raw horsepower, or the reverse? If the committee can't answer that in the same room, the search will surface it eventually, usually at the worst possible moment — a verbal offer that unravels because someone late in the process wanted something nobody said out loud.

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None of this is exotic. It's the difference between a search that runs six to ten weeks and one that runs six months and still ends in a mis-hire. If you're staring down a key search and want a second set of eyes on the brief before it goes out, that's a fifteen-minute conversation, not a pitch.