Why senior commercial searches fail at the brief
A brief is not a fixed document. It is the current best account of a role, and the market will answer back, some of it before the search begins and the rest while it runs. What matters is whether the search moves with it.
The search that taught us this most clearly ended at final stage.
It was a VP level Marketing appointment, briefed around new business. The company had put its growth behind winning new logos, and the brief was written around someone who could go and do that. We ran the search against that specification and found a great person. By the assessment of everyone who met them, they were right for the role as it had been originally described.
In the final conversation, the CMO explained, due to a change in the business strategy, that the company was moving to a land and expand strategy. The priority was now growth inside accounts already won. Sadly, the candidate withdrew themselves from the process and turned down the offer.
Honestly, they were right to withdraw. Opening a market and expanding inside an existing one are different disciplines, built on different instincts, measured on different things. A leader who is excellent at one likely would not be interested in the other. Added to that, the good ones know which they are. The CMO was also right. The strategy had moved for reasons that had nothing to do with the search and everything to do with the business, and holding a course that had stopped making sense would have been the worse decision.
Nobody in that process made a poor call. The failure was structural. A real change of direction reached the candidate before it reached the search strategy.
Three ways this shows up
In over twenty years of running commercial searches across Europe, I have seen it take three recognisable forms.
The first happens in the interview room. Five people interview a candidate against five accounts of the role, each one accurate from their seat. Creating five versions of truth. One is assessing for a builder, another for someone who can manage an existing team, a third for a specific market they have privately decided is the priority. What usually goes wrong here is not what people expect. More often than not, the candidate is rejected. Someone raises a doubt, based on something that was never in the brief because it had never been agreed, and a doubt is difficult to answer when there is no shared standard to answer it against. The candidate comes out of the process and it is written up as not quite the right fit. Occasionally it runs the other way and they withdraw, having sat through five conversations and taken from them that the role is still being worked out. Either way you lose the same person, and it was the brief that decided it rather than the interviews.
The second is the one described above. A strategy, a structure or a reporting line moves during a live search. Normal, in any business worth joining. The cost sits in the gap between the change happening and anybody re-briefing on it.
The third is the quietest of the three. The level or the remit moves after the search has started, sometimes twice. Senior commercial leaders are specialised by then. A Director who has run a region is not interchangeable with a VP who has carried a European number, and a candidate assessed against the first specification cannot simply be reassessed against the second. When the remit moves, the shortlist in front of you is not the only casualty. The pool behind it was built against the old brief too, so the search restarts without anybody quite calling it a restart, and a set of good people have been measured against a role that no longer exists.
Most of it is knowable before you start
So we built the process around both halves of this. Some of it can be prevented. The rest cannot, and should not be.
A lot of what changes during a search was already knowable before it began. Whether the profile exists at that level, in those markets, at that money. Where the compensation sits against the people who would actually take the call. Which parts of the specification the stakeholders are quietly holding different views on. None of that needs a search to uncover it. It needs somebody to ask the market and ask the room, before the first approach rather than after the fourth interview.
That is what the Pre-Search Diagnostic does at Animate Europe. It ends with the stakeholders aligned, the profile confirmed against people who genuinely exist, the money benchmarked against that profile and one brief that everybody has signed. Occasionally the role is reshaped as a result and goes to market as something different from the document we were first handed. That is the exercise working. The role does not stay as written either way. Without the diagnostic it just changes later, in front of a candidate.
The rest has to be absorbed by the search
No amount of preparation stops a CMO reading the market correctly in month two and moving. Nor should it. A hiring team meets four credible people and understands something about the role that no briefing could have told them in advance. Interviews are information. A company that revises its thinking after meeting real candidates is usually thinking well, and the specification should be allowed to move.
It just has to move inside the search rather than alongside it, and that comes down to who is running it. When the person who took the brief is the same person running the process and sitting in the offer conversation, a change of direction is a conversation on the day it happens. The brief is revised, the reasoning is understood rather than relayed, and the search adjusts around it. Where the brief was taken by one team and handed to another to execute, that same change becomes a handover. It arrives late, and it arrives thinner than it left.
The expensive version is the one where everybody involved understands the role has changed, and the last person to be told is the candidate you wanted.
If you are briefing a search in the coming months
Three things are worth doing regardless of who you appoint to run it.
Before you go to market, ask every person who will interview to describe the role and the person in their own words, in writing, and read the answers side by side. The disagreements are always there. It costs very little to find them among colleagues and a great deal to find them in front of your preferred candidate.
Then test the specification against the market rather than against your own expectations, particularly on level and on money. A profile that does not exist at the number you have set will not be produced by a longer shortlist.
Once the search is running, treat any change in strategy, structure or reporting line as a re-brief, and say so on the day it happens. The change itself is almost never the problem. Silence around it is.
None of this is an argument for briefs that never move. Briefs move. They move before they go out and they move once real candidates are in front of you, and both are usually a sign that people are paying attention. A search built properly can take it. The expensive version is the one where everybody involved understands the role has changed, and the last person to be told is the candidate you wanted.
