Raising the Bar in Leadership Hiring Practices

Hiring senior executives is one of the most important decisions leaders make; yet it is often one of the least structured decisions. Even experienced CEOs and boards rely on intuition, informal conversations and loosely organized interviews, only to discover months later that the hire didn't work out.

We see this pattern repeatedly in our work with middle-market companies at our private capital investment firm, PPC. These are good businesses with strong leaders and loyal customers, but as they scale, leadership roles grow more complex, and the hiring bar must rise accordingly. Too often, the process does not keep pace. Leaders who demand rigor in strategic and capital allocation accept far less discipline in hiring, relying on incomplete evidence and intuition for arguably their most consequential decisions. The result is avoidable mis-hires.

A deeper issue underlies many of these mistakes: Roles are defined based on what the business has been rather than what it needs to become. Job specifications reflect current structures and challenges, leading teams to favor candidates who fit the current state over those who can build the future. Without a forward-looking lens, even a well-run process can produce the wrong outcome.

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