Alex Doran

The ones who fail usually failed at the offer stage and nobody noticed for a year. Somebody sold them a job that four people in the room described differently. They walk in solving a problem two of those people don't think exists, and by month nine they've spent all their credit arguing about what the job actually is.

I've stopped believing the individual is the variable. Put the same person into a business that agreed what it wanted and they look like a brilliant hire. Put them into one that didn't and they look like a mistake.

Everything upstream of the shortlist is already gone. Mapping a market used to take a researcher three weeks and now it takes an afternoon, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

What it can't do is sit opposite somebody and know they're describing a turnaround they watched rather than one they ran. It hasn't been access for years: everybody can find everybody. What clients pay for is judgement and the willingness to be wrong in public, and our industry has never worked out how to invoice for that.

Gravitas. It's the word people reach for when they can't say what they actually mean, and it correlates with being tall and sounding certain more than it correlates with being right.

The most effective people I've placed in the last five years were not the most impressive in the room. They were the ones who changed their mind when the evidence moved.

Mostly an excuse, and I include myself in that. It's a word people use when they can't say why they didn't like someone.

There is a real version. If a business makes decisions by argument and you hire someone who experiences argument as conflict, that is a genuine mismatch and it will not resolve. But that's a specific claim you can write down. "Culture fit" as it's usually deployed is a feeling given a job title.

Someone who can hold a plan loosely. Five years ago a three-year plan was a credential; now it's a liability if you can't say what would make you abandon it.

The brief has changed even where the job title hasn't. Boards ask about adaptability now in a way they simply did not, and they mean it.

They start it eighteen months too late, and then they run it as a process rather than a decision. By the time anyone is formally identified, everyone in the building already knows who it is, and the process is theatre for the two people who disagree.

No, and the irrationality is concentrated in one place: the premium for having done the exact job before. Businesses pay enormously for it and it predicts less than they think, because the thing that made someone effective at the last company is often the thing that doesn't travel.

Three situations, and all three are more common than we admit. If you already know who you want, don't pay us to validate a decision you've made. We will take the money and produce a very professional-looking process, and at the end you'll hire the person you were always going to hire.

Second, if the role is genuinely findable, and more roles are findable than search firms will say. And third, the real one: don't ring us if you haven't agreed internally what the job is. If four people in that room describe it differently, ring each other.

The numbers moved and the pipeline didn't. Non-executive appointments changed materially, executive ones far less, and the reason is that the executive pipeline is built two levels below the board where nobody is counting.

We changed one thing that worked: we now report to clients on who was approached, not only who was presented. It's uncomfortable and it has changed the shortlists.

Sixty-forty in favour of the company, and I'd have said the reverse ten years ago. I've watched the same person be a great appointment in one business and a poor one in another eighteen months later. Nothing about them changed.

A finance director from a business two-thirds the size, for a portfolio company that wanted somebody with the scars. The panel thought it was a stretch and two of them said so in the room.

She's the chief executive now. What I saw was somebody who asked me three questions about the shareholder that nobody else had thought to ask.

"What have you got wrong that you still think about?"

An exit interview, years ago. She said "personal circumstances" and I wrote it down, because that's what everybody says. I asked her off-script what the actual reason was and she told me the sums had stopped working in February and she'd been pretending otherwise since.

I'd written "personal circumstances" a dozen times that year. I still think about how many of those were something I could have done something about.