Some seats should never see a recruiter, including ours

We run a search firm. So when a founder asks us to run a search, the commercial answer is almost always yes. I want to make the case for the exceptions, because the exceptions are where our industry loses the trust it spends the rest of the time trying to earn.

A search firm is a specialised tool. It’s very good at a specific job: you know the role, you know roughly what ‘good’ looks like, and the hard part is reach: finding the 15 people on the planet who could do it, getting to them, and moving them. That’s real work and it’s worth paying for. We do it every week and we’re not shy about the fee.

But there’s a category of seat where the role isn’t known yet, ‘good’ hasn’t been defined, and the reach was never the constraint. On those, hiring us postpones your problem and adds a layer of distance between you and a decision only you can make. I’d rather tell you that upfront than take the retainer and hope you don’t notice.

Three come up again and again. The first is the founder-adjacent hire: the chief of staff, the first real number two, the person who will finish your sentences in rooms you’re not in. The competence bar matters, but the thing that actually decides this hire is a working chemistry that only you can feel. No third party can assess it for you, and if we tell you we can, we’re selling. You have to sit with these people yourself, more than once, in unscripted settings, and trust your read.

The second is the first leader of a function that doesn’t exist yet. Your first Head of Data. Your first real Product leader in a services company. This person writes the playbook from scratch, and the way they write it sets the culture of that function for a decade. Hand the brief to a recruiter and you get a strong candidate matched to a spec, but you skipped the part where writing the spec forces you to decide what you actually want that function to become. That deciding is the job. It can’t be delegated, because whoever does it is quietly setting your strategy.

The third is a genuine succession seat: the person your board is being asked to bless as the eventual answer to ‘what happens if the CEO is gone tomorrow.’ A firm can widen the field and pressure-test names, and there we can help. What a firm cannot do is own the choice. When a board outsources the conviction behind a successor, it usually shows up two years later as a governance problem nobody wants to relitigate.

Usually the shortlist is strong. The failure is subtler, and it’s about ownership. On these seats the value of the process is the thinking it forces the principal to do. A good search firm, doing its job well, absorbs that thinking so the client doesn’t have to. On an ordinary role that’s a service. On a founder-defining role it’s a quiet theft of the one thing you couldn’t afford to give away.

I’ve watched it happen. A founder hands us a chief-of-staff brief because they’re slammed, we run a clean process, they hire someone genuinely capable, and 8 months later it’s not working, because the founder never did the interior work of deciding who they could actually build alongside. The brief was a way of avoiding a decision. We should have said no. Sometimes we have.

There’s also a plainer version of the problem. The more central the seat, the more the candidates will read who’s carrying the conversation. When a founder personally chases their number two, that’s a signal the person hears. When a recruiter does it on the founder’s behalf, the signal changes, and for the very best people that difference decides whether they pick up the phone.

This is an argument for using firms like ours on the problems we’re built for. When a role is well understood, when the constraint is genuinely reach, when the market is deep enough that you need someone working it full-time and objectively, that’s squarely our job, and doing it yourself is usually the more expensive mistake. Building a whole GCC leadership bench, filling a scarce specialist function, running a confidential replacement without tipping the market: bring those to us.

What I’m asking is that you notice the difference before you write the brief. If the hard part of a hire is finding the person, hire a firm. If the hard part is deciding what you want, no firm can carry that for you, and the honest ones will hand it back. We’d rather be the firm that tells you which of your seats we shouldn’t touch. It’s a strange thing to put in writing, but it’s the version of us worth hiring for the seats we should. If you’re not sure which kind of seat you’re looking at, that’s a conversation worth having before it’s a search, start there.