The Executive Hiring Guide 2027

Titles are unreliable. A Director in one business runs a function inside parameters set above them; a Head of in another sets commercial strategy and sits with the board. The distinction that matters is whether the appointment is accountable for direction or for delivery against direction set elsewhere.

• The role decides what the business does in its area, not only how well it is done.
• It carries accountability the board itself answers for — revenue, financial control, operational delivery, technical risk.
• It changes how decisions are made, not just the speed at which they are made.
• A mistake is slow and expensive to correct, because the consequences appear in performance rather than in output.

The most common sequence is backwards: a board decides it needs a Sales Director, then writes a description of what a Sales Director does. The better sequence starts with the commercial problem and lets the role follow from it. Businesses that do this frequently end up recruiting something different from what they set out to recruit — a Commercial Director rather than a Sales Director, a strengthened Financial Controller plus a fractional CFO rather than a full-time CFO, an interim rather than a permanent appointment.

Write the outcome down in terms a candidate could be held to. "Lead the commercial function" is a duty. "Build a repeatable pipeline that supports the three-year plan without depending on the founder's relationships" is an outcome, and it attracts a different and more useful conversation.

Permanent appointments provide long-term ownership and the accumulation of relationships and credibility. Interim appointments provide immediate leadership for a defined period. Fractional appointments provide ongoing senior capability on part of a week. None is superior; they solve different problems.

1. How many days a week of genuinely executive decision-making does the outcome require? Much of a typical executive job description is management work.
2. Is the requirement permanent, or attached to a defined period of change?
3. How quickly is leadership needed? A permanent search plus notice periods rarely delivers a leader inside three to six months.
4. Is there someone internal to execute between visits, or does the role need daily presence?
5. What is the transition plan out of the model chosen? Most of these arrangements eventually change.

An executive without decision rights is an expensive adviser. The board should be able to answer, in specifics, what the appointment can do without asking.

• Spend authority, and at what level approval is required.
• Hiring and restructuring authority within the function.
• Pricing, discount and contractual sign-off latitude.
• Who the role reports to, and whether that will change within a year.
• Board attendance, and in what capacity — present, contribute, or vote as a statutory director.
• What sits explicitly outside the remit, including anything the owner intends to keep.

Where a candidate is to be appointed as a statutory director, the role carries legal duties under the Companies Act 2006 that are distinct from the job itself. Both sides should be clear about whether the appointment is a statutory directorship or a director-level position.

Running both routes in parallel is legitimate where the stakes justify it, provided the internal candidate is told honestly that this is what is happening. Ambiguity at this point loses good people twice: the appointment and the incumbent.

Executive interviews reward articulacy. Assessment has to go further than that, and the useful discipline is separating what a candidate personally owned from what happened around them during their tenure.

• What specifically did you decide, and what would have happened if you had decided otherwise?
• What did you inherit, and what state was it in when you left?
• Which of your decisions there turned out to be wrong, and when did you realise?
• What was the scale and structure you operated in — and how much of your effectiveness depended on resources this business does not have?
• Who did you have to persuade, and how did that go when they disagreed?

Sector experience versus transferable leadership

Sector experience matters where the market has real barriers: regulation, specification-led selling, technical credibility earned slowly, or unusual routes to market. It matters less where the commercial model is the harder part of the job. Over-weighting it is one of the most common ways businesses narrow a field down to the wrong four people.

Replacing an executive still in post, planning a succession that has not been announced, or preparing leadership ahead of a transaction all require a controlled process: a small internal circle, a description of the opportunity that does not identify the business until the right point, and clear handling where a candidate works for a customer or competitor.

Succession deserves its own planning rather than being handled as a recruitment event. The Executive Succession Guide covers planned and unplanned transitions in detail.

• Hiring the title rather than defining the outcome.
• Copying the leadership structure of a larger business at a different stage.
• Leaving reporting lines and decision authority unresolved until after the start date.
• Board members holding unreconciled views about what the role is for.
• Choosing full-time by default where interim or fractional fits the requirement better.
• Hiring too late, then expecting the appointment to recover a year of lost ground in a quarter.
• Treating onboarding as an induction rather than as the transfer of context, relationships and authority.

A workable shape for the first year

1. First ninety days: understand the business, validate or challenge the diagnosis, build credibility with the team and the board.
2. Months three to six: agreed plan, structural decisions taken, early evidence of change.
3. Months six to twelve: performance in the numbers the board plans against, and a team capable of sustaining it.

The board's job during that year is to hold the mandate steady. Executives rarely fail because they did the wrong things; they fail because the definition of the job changed three times while they were doing them.