Myšlenky o vedení,
talentu a organizaci.

There is a version of executive search that treats the market like a database. Post a brief. Search a platform. Filter by keyword. Wait for responses.

The problem is not that this process is slow. It is that it systematically misses the people you actually want.

Research consistently puts the proportion of passive talent at the senior level above seventy percent. Some estimates, particularly for C-suite and board-adjacent roles, place it closer to eighty. These are not people who are between roles or quietly dissatisfied. They are people who are performing well and are not looking, but who would consider the right conversation, with the right person, about the right opportunity.

The leaders who matter at the senior level are almost never looking. They are not monitoring job boards. They are not updating their profiles. They are working. Running things. Building reputations quietly.

To reach this group, you do not post. You call. And for the call to go anywhere, the person on the other end has to believe that you understand their world, that you know the landscape they operate in, and why this particular role might be worth thirty minutes of their time.

The credibility problem is not a messaging problem. It is a knowledge problem. If the search firm does not carry genuine sector expertise, if they are working from a brief rather than from a relationship, the conversation never happens.

This is why passive candidate access is not a feature of good search. It is the entire point.

"We spent six months looking in the wrong places before someone made the right call."
Group CEO, European industrial group

Hunter Stone was built around this premise. Our consultants do not broadcast. They call the right people, with a specific reason, from a position of genuine knowledge. That is the only way to reach the candidates who are not available, and the only way to know which unavailable candidates are worth the effort.

Most executive search engagements begin the same way. A brief lands. It contains a job title, a set of responsibilities, a list of required experience, perhaps a salary range. The firm processes the brief and begins identifying candidates.

This is the standard model. It is also why so many searches produce shortlists that are technically correct and fundamentally disappointing.

A brief is information. It is not understanding. And at the senior level, the gap between the two is where searches go wrong.

The brief tells you the title: Chief Financial Officer. It tells you the requirements: fifteen years experience, listed company background, international exposure. What it does not tell you is the real question, what does exceptional look like in this organization, at this moment, given where the business is trying to go?

Post-mortem analysis of failed executive hires consistently identifies profile definition failure as a root cause in approximately a third of cases: not a bad hire, but the wrong specification to begin with.

At Hunter Stone, the listening period is not a formality before the search begins. It is the beginning of the search. We will ask questions that go beyond the brief. We will push back on assumptions that seem reasonable on paper but that our experience suggests are worth examining.

A brief tells you the job. The work of a good search firm is understanding the role.

"We came into that first meeting thinking we had a clear picture of what we needed. What we did not have was an honest answer to the question of what had actually gone wrong with the previous appointment. That conversation took an hour. The search that followed took nine weeks."
Chairman, professional services partnership

The generalist argument for executive search goes something like this: good search is good search. The skills required to identify, assess, and place a senior leader are fundamentally the same across industries.

This argument has a surface logic. And it is wrong in ways that matter.

At the senior level, the most important thing a search firm does is not assess CVs. It is get the right people on the phone. And that depends almost entirely on credibility, the sense that the person calling them understands their world well enough to make the conversation worth having.

Credibility of this kind cannot be faked. It comes from knowing the sector's key players, its current pressures, its talent flows, and its specific language.

In sectors where people talk to each other, private equity, financial services, professional services, healthcare, your reputation as a search firm is known. Candidates remember which firms approached them thoughtfully and which sent them a template.

"You know within thirty seconds. The sector knowledge is either there or it is not."
CFO, global asset management firm

Hunter Stone consultants work in sectors they understand. Not as a claim. As a requirement.

There is a number that most organizations never calculate when they begin an executive search. It is not the fee. It is the cost of the vacancy.

SHRM research puts the cost of an unfilled executive position at up to 213% of the role's annual salary, once lost productivity, deferred decisions, and team disruption are factored in. For a role carrying a salary of £200,000, that is a potential exposure of over £400,000.

A leadership vacuum at the senior level is never passive. It does not simply pause the function until a hire is made. It creates a set of conditions, deferred decisions, uncertain teams, work that either does not get done or gets done by someone who should not be doing it, that accumulate quietly across the duration of the search.

The average C-suite search takes between three and five months. CEO vacancies average closer to five. The longer the search runs, the larger the number. And most searches run longer than they need to.

"We talked about the search fee in every leadership meeting. Nobody once put a number on what the vacancy itself was costing us. When we finally did the calculation, it was uncomfortable."
CEO, private equity-backed business

A search fee is a defined cost. A slow search is an open one. The best firms understand the difference.

If you have reached a senior level in your career, you have heard from search firms. The range of those experiences is wide.

At one end: a message arrives with a subject line that bears no relationship to your background. The role described is two levels below what you do. The follow-up never comes. Research suggests 39% of senior professionals have been ghosted by a firm they were engaged with. More than half have abandoned a search process entirely because of poor communication.

At the other end: a call from someone who clearly knows your sector, has a specific reason for reaching out to you in particular, and is representing a role that is genuinely relevant to where you are in your career.

The difference between these experiences is not style. It is preparation and intent. Good search at the senior level starts from a different premise. You are not a name in a database. You are a specific person, and the firm contacting you should have already done the work of thinking through whether the fit is worth the call.

At Hunter Stone, we contact candidates when we have a specific mandate and a genuine reason to believe the fit is worth exploring. We do not present your details without your agreement. And if the role is not right, we say so clearly.

"The call lasted four minutes. It was the most relevant approach I had received in twelve years."
Group COO, multinational consumer goods business

There is a moment in some executive searches when the shortlist arrives and something feels off.

The candidates are qualified. Their CVs are credible. On paper, each of them could do the job. But the caliber does not feel quite right. There is no candidate on the list about whom anyone in the room has said: this person is genuinely exceptional.

Research from Heidrick & Struggles, based on analysis of 20,000 executive placements, found that 40% of senior hires are pushed out, fail, or quit within eighteen months. The Corporate Executive Board places the figure closer to fifty percent. A failed executive placement typically costs the organization between two and four times the executive's annual salary.

The incorrect response, which happens more often than it should, is to push forward with a shortlist that no one believes in. It rarely works.

At Hunter Stone, we would rather have a difficult conversation at the shortlist stage than present candidates we do not believe in. If the market is telling us something, we say so. A second mediocre shortlist is not a solution. It is a delay.

"There was a moment in the boardroom when I looked at the shortlist and knew, but nobody said it. We ran the interviews anyway. Six months later we were running the search again. The time we lost in that silence cost us far more than an honest conversation would have."
Board Director, FTSE-listed healthcare business

The measure of a search firm is not how quickly it produces a shortlist. It is how honestly it reports what it is finding.