Priya co-founded Halloran Bruce in 2011 after a decade in financial services search, the last four years running a European banking practice. The company places chief executives, chief risk officers and board directors into banks, insurers and asset managers, and is retained by several of the UK’s larger mid-tier institutions.
Seventeen people across London and Edinburgh. Priya holds the Financial Services chair in the first volume of The Executive Search Ten.
The ones who work out are almost always the ones who asked the hardest questions before they signed. If they’re not interrogating you, they’re not going to interrogate the business either.
I’ve stopped treating a difficult candidate process as a warning sign. The people who made me work hardest in the search are the ones still in post five years later.
The mapping is done. In regulated markets that happened quietly years ago: every institution can produce the same list of forty names, so the list is worth nothing.
What a machine cannot tell you is who the regulator trusts. That sits in a hundred conversations that were never written down, and it is now most of what we sell.
Confidence. Banking rewards it, promotes it, and then holds an inquiry into it. Half the failures I have watched were confident men being confidently wrong.
The quality nobody lists and everybody needs is the willingness to be the boring voice in a bullish room.
It is real in one narrow sense: an institution’s attitude to risk is a culture, and hiring against it fails. That you can assess, and we do.
Everything else that gets called fit is comfort. Comfort is how boards end up hiring the same person eleven times.
Somebody who can carry a balance sheet and a conscience at the same time. The last five years put conduct on the front page, and the institutions that suffered least were run by people who treated the rules as a floor rather than a ceiling.
They treat it as an emergency instead of a discipline. A succession that starts when the incumbent resigns is not succession, it is a search with a deadline. The well-run institutions are never actually searching: the next two names are known years out.
It is rational about the wrong variable. It prices experience precisely and judgement not at all, because experience is on the CV and judgement only shows up three years after the appointment.
When the appointment is really a signal. If a business wants to tell the market it is serious about risk, hiring a heavyweight is the expensive way to send a message a policy change would send better. We decline those when we can see them coming.
Regulation moved the non-executive numbers, and the numbers are real. What has moved less is the executive pipeline, and my sector cannot blame anyone else for that: we control the shortlists.
The change I rate is quieter: chairs now ask for the pipeline data unprompted. Ten years ago I was asked for it once.
Sixty-forty the institution. A leader in a bank operates inside capital rules, committees and a supervisor’s expectations. The room to be brilliant is narrower than anyone outside it believes, and the room to fail is wide.
A chief risk officer who had blocked a deal his previous board loved, and been eased out for it. Two clients passed. The third took him, and he is the reason they came through the last downturn clean.
The thing everyone read as inflexibility was the thing the job actually is.
“What do you know that the market doesn’t agree with yet?”
That institutions over-pay for people who resemble the last crisis. Every post-crisis hiring wave recruits the person who would have prevented the previous problem, and the next problem is never the previous one.
Asked at every sitting, answered without thinking too hard.