Insights — Executive Recruitment — 3 min read
How Should a Business Write a Brief for a Senior Leadership Hire?
A brief that lists duties can be written in an afternoon. A brief that can actually be tested against takes structured thought before it takes words.
In short
Writing a brief for a senior leadership hire means designing the role before describing it: agreeing the mission of the role in one sentence, three to five measurable outcomes it must deliver in its first year, the competencies genuinely required to deliver them, and a simple rating scale the panel can apply consistently to every candidate. This is role design and assessment scorecard work, distinct from the separate task of briefing a recruiter on how to run the search itself.
A job description tells candidates what the role involves. It rarely tells anyone — including the panel interviewing for it — what a successful appointment will actually have done a year in.
The more useful document is closer to a scorecard: a small number of specific outcomes and competencies that every candidate can be rated against consistently, and that the eventual appointment can be reviewed against later.
Start with the mission, not the job title
Write one sentence that states why the role exists, independent of the person who might fill it. 'Build a repeatable commercial function that does not depend on the founder' is a mission. 'Lead the sales team' is a title restated. The mission sentence is the test every later decision should be checked against.
Turn the mission into outcomes, not duties
Duties describe activity. Outcomes describe a state the business will be in if the appointment succeeds. Three to five outcomes are usually enough — more than that and the role loses focus, fewer and it is probably too narrow for the seniority being recruited.
- Weak: 'Manage the sales team and report to the board.'
- Better: 'A forecast the board can plan against with confidence within two quarters.'
- Weak: 'Own commercial strategy.'
- Better: 'A pricing structure that protects margin across the three largest accounts by the end of year one.'
Identify the competencies the outcomes actually require
Work backwards from the outcomes to the capability needed to deliver them, rather than listing generic leadership traits. A role built around fixing forecasting discipline needs analytical rigour and the authority to change process; a role built around a first move into a new market needs judgement under ambiguity and comfort building something from nothing. These are different profiles even at the same title and salary level.
Build a simple, comparable rating scale
Score each candidate against each outcome and competency on the same scale — for example, clear evidence of achieving this, some relevant evidence, no evidence either way. The value is not precision; it is comparability. A panel that scores candidates independently before discussing them will surface disagreement worth exploring, rather than converging early on the most confident presenter.
| Element | Purpose | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Mission | Why the role exists | Build commercial capability that survives the founder stepping back |
| Outcome 1 | What must be true in 12 months | A forecasting process the board trusts, run without the founder |
| Outcome 2 | What must be true in 12 months | A second layer of sales management appointed and performing |
| Competency | What delivering the outcomes requires | Comfort building structure from an informal starting point |
| Rating scale | How every candidate is compared | Strong evidence / some evidence / no evidence |
Test the brief against the people who will manage the appointment
Show the draft outcomes to whoever the executive will report to and whoever they will manage. If either group would describe success differently, the brief is not finished — it is a version of what one stakeholder wants, which is exactly the gap that produces a mismatched appointment.
How this differs from briefing a recruiter
This scorecard is the business's own role design work — the outcomes, competencies and rating criteria used to judge every candidate consistently. Briefing an executive recruiter is a related but separate conversation about authority, reporting lines, reward and how the search itself will run. The scorecard should exist before that briefing conversation happens, and the recruiter should be given it rather than reconstructing it from a job advert.
Considering an executive appointment?
Evans Sales Consultancy recruits eleven executive roles across permanent, interim and fractional engagement models — starting with what the appointment has to deliver.
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