The conversation that happens before recruitment starts is the one that determines if it will succeed.
A few years ago, I was engaged to recruit a CEO for an aged care provider. I took the job brief from the Board Chair and got to work.
I didn’t anticipate the Board Chair would relocate overseas mid-process. It meant the kind of ongoing collaboration that shapes and finesses a strong shortlist simply wasn’t there.
But the bigger issue went deeper than that. The brief had come from the Board Chair alone. There was no diversity of thinking, no real democracy in the process and no collaboration on the person specification until midway through. Who was the CEO I was really looking for in the marketplace? That question needed to be answered through multiple Non-Executive Director perspectives, not one. That’s good governance.
In hindsight, I should have paused the process there and asked for additional participants. But Boards have a way of doing things and on the whole, I respect that.
I presented four candidates. I felt it was a diverse range of value propositions from a candidate perspective and a strong shortlist. They were all experienced, credible and eager.
The feedback after the interviews stopped me in my tracks.
None of them were innovative enough.
Run of the mill aged care CEOs and C-Suite execs.
Same same.
My first instinct was to go back to market. Find more candidates. Cast the net wider. Then I realised that going back to the same talent pool without understanding what had gone wrong would just produce more of the same.
The candidates weren’t the problem. The brief was.
A strong shortlist starts with the brief
As a hiring organisation, the brief is the key to getting the type of candidates you want on your shortlist.
A brief built from one perspective is a brief built on one set of assumptions, one set of priorities and one vision of what good looks like. There’s rarely just one person interviewing and making the hiring decision, so all perspectives should be included from the start.
At PJ Recruitment & Executive Search, we invest considerable time at the brief stage, drawing in multiple voices and actively probing for the things that won’t make it into a job description but will absolutely determine whether a placement succeeds.
The culture the board wants to build, not just the one it currently has.
The leadership style that will complement the existing team rather than replicate it.
The spoken or unspoken mandate the new leader will be expected to deliver on.
Getting this right at the start is infinitely less painful than resetting a shortlist two months in.
When a reset is needed, start with a debrief, not a re-search
When a shortlist doesn’t land, there’s pressure to act quickly. Boards are anxious. The role is vacant. The instinct is to go straight back to market.
But going back to market without understanding why the shortlist missed doesn’t solve the problem. And in a talent pool as interconnected as the care sector, you’re likely to come back with a variation of what you already presented, because you’re still looking in the same place.
A debrief after a missed shortlist doesn’t need to be long. But it does need to be honest. The most useful conversations cover three things:
- What the Board responded to – even if they didn’t appoint.
There’s always something, even if it’s just a moment in an interview where a candidate said something that landed. A quality one person had that others lacked. This can give useful signals about what the organisation is actually drawn to and it’s often a little different from the original brief. - What felt consistently absent.
If the panel felt the same way about all the candidates, the gap is almost certainly in the brief rather than the market. Naming that gap precisely – innovation, external perspective or a particular kind of commercial acumen – is the essential first step to finding someone who has it. - Whether the success profile needs to change.
What does good look like at twelve months, eighteen months, three years? Sometimes the honest answer points toward a very different kind of candidate than the one the original brief described.
Sometimes, the issue isn’t the brief at all. It’s how the interviews were run. Consider pressure testing the interview process itself. Was the environment conducive to free-flowing, honest conversation or did it feel stifling? Should the interview guides be redeveloped, drawing on multiple stakeholder perspectives rather than a single viewpoint? Is there a consistent scoring matrix candidates are measured against? And was the interview panel itself consistent throughout or were Directors and stakeholders swapping in and out between rounds?
Getting it right the first time
The CEO search I described didn’t need a bigger candidate pool. It needed a brief built from more than one perspective, with a clearer picture of what the organisation really needed rather than what one person assumed it needed.
That’s the work that happens before a single candidate is approached. And it’s almost always the difference between a shortlist that lands and one that doesn’t.
At PJ Recruitment & Executive Search, we invest the time upfront, because the right brief is the foundation of the right hire. If your next search matters, we’d love to talk.