Why most technology leadership searches fail in the first fortnight

I run thirty-odd technology-leadership searches per year. Across that volume, the searches that go cleanly to offer in 8 to 12 weeks have one trait in common: the brief was finished before the search began. The searches that drift to 18 weeks or beyond almost always have the opposite trait — the brief was finished as the search progressed, and the implicit re-briefing showed up in the form of dropped candidates, late-stage criteria changes, and a hiring committee that learned what it actually wanted at the on-site loop instead of in a conference room four weeks earlier.

A pressure-tested brief is not a long brief. It is a brief that names the three or four things that, if they are missing in a candidate, will cause the hiring committee to decline at second-round. It is a brief that puts a salary band on paper, signed off by the CFO, before any candidate is approached. And it is a brief that names, by name, two or three living people the hiring committee would consider perfect for the role — not as poaching targets, but as a calibration set.

The third item is the hardest to do well. Hiring committees often resist it. The reason it matters is that the calibration set converts a job description into a search prompt. Without it, the firm is searching against an imagined ideal that varies between members of the hiring committee, and that variance compounds across candidates.

When a search firm — ours or anyone else's — agrees to start a search without these three things in place, the firm is taking on the risk of having to do the brief work after billing has begun. That risk inevitably gets absorbed by the candidate experience. Candidates feel the difference.

We have a discipline that the brief is signed by the CFO (or equivalent budget owner) before our team is mobilised. We have lost roughly two retained briefs a year to this discipline. We have also delivered every search we have started in 2025 inside 12 weeks. The trade is correct.