Dear HR: Please Step Away from the Search. This Is a Job for the Grown-Ups.
Look, we need to talk. And not in the “circle-back-on-Friday” way. I mean a real talk. The kind of talk that makes eye contact and skips the preamble.
I work in executive search. High-level talent advisory. The kind of engagements where a business needs to find someone mission-critical. Someone who will shift revenue, lead transformation, or stop the wheels from coming off entirely. I’ve worked with brilliant COOs, visionary founders, people who actually understand the stakes. And then, inevitably, HR enters the chat.
HR, I see you. You do essential work. The company doesn’t run without payroll, policies, and performance reviews. But can we please stop pretending that finding a Chief Product Officer is the same as onboarding a campus grad? They’re not the same sport.
I wasn’t hired to “align with your talent competency framework” or sit in a circle ranking behavioral traits. I was brought in because something mattered enough to require external firepower. Because you needed someone with judgment, speed, and precision. You needed someone who knows how to land game-changers, not fill out workflow forms.
Please. Respect the mission. Stay in your lane.
HR vs. Executive Search
Here’s how it usually goes:
The business reaches out. They need a CMO. A real one. Not someone who “does a bit of marketing.” Someone who can build a brand, drive growth, hire a world-class team, and only sleep four hours a night without crying. It’s urgent. It’s commercial. So they bring us in.
We prep. We map the market. We sharpen the brief. We shortlist the top 0.1% of candidates. The ones who aren't applying, because they’re already winning somewhere else. We know how to reach them. We know how to speak their language.
And then… HR slides into the calendar invite.
Suddenly, the energy changes. We’re no longer solving a business problem. We’re in a wordsmithing workshop. The priority isn’t "how do we attract the best talent in-market?", it’s “should we capitalize the word ‘innovative’ in the job description?” There’s concern that “growth hacker” sounds aggressive. Someone suggests we add “collaborative spirit” to the bullet points. Another person brings up the internal salary bands, which are apparently being reviewed... and have been for the past six months.
How do I say this? Umm.. No candidate worth hiring is waiting around for a benchmarking document to reach version 4.1.
We weren’t hired to negotiate adjectives. We were hired to bring you top-tier, high-impact talent. People who don’t reply to job ads, because they’re busy running billion-dollar businesses. This isn’t a clerical exercise. It’s a competitive maneuver.
We’re not here to displace HR. But let’s not confuse functions. We’re here to move the needle.
The Greatest Threat to Talent Strategy: The HR Meddle
The HR Meddle is familiar to anyone who's ever tried to run a focused, high-value executive search and found themselves slowly dragged into a low-stakes process vortex.
It starts innocently enough. A calendar invite here. A polite request to “loop me in on candidate emails” there. You tell yourself it’s fine. Collaborative, even. But before you know it, there’s an HR business partner sitting in on final-round interviews asking the CFO candidate how they feel about hybrid work policies and whether they’ve familiarized themselves with the internal mobility charter.
This isn’t collaboration. It’s the illusion of adding value while slowly suffocating momentum.
We’re not against working together. In fact, great hiring requires alignment. But alignment and micromanagement are not the same thing. When your role in the process is to “stay across it,” that’s not a role, it’s a roadblock. It’s optics over outcomes.
The worst part? These are often the same people who recite lines like:
“This isn’t how we usually do it.”
“We typically start by posting the role internally.”
“Can we get a status deck each Friday with color-coded updates?”
Meanwhile, the candidate you desperately needed, the chap who could have transformed your commercial roadmap, has gone elsewhere. Because while we were politely reviewing timelines and governance steps, their other offer moved from intro call to signed contract in under two weeks.
This is the real cost of the HR involvement. It’s not even annoying, it’s actively damaging your talent strategy. You don’t lose candidates because your brand isn't compelling. You lose them because your process makes it look like your decision-making lives in a swamp.
And no one world-class wants to work in a swamp.
Strategic Talent Advisory Needs a Business Audience, Not a Policy Committee
Executive search is a commercial discipline. It exists to solve real business problems, not to improve alignment with a job architecture spreadsheet. We're not here to finesse the phrasing of bullet points. We're here to change the trajectory of the company.
That’s why we need access to decision-makers. Real ones. People who understand how business velocity works. People who get that waiting three weeks for stakeholder alignment means missing three top-tier candidates who’ve already moved on.
We need to speak with people who don’t just know where this new hire fits on the org chart, but why they matter to the next 12 months of revenue, retention, or reinvention. People who can talk risk, trade-offs, and outcomes. Not competencies, alignment, and frameworks.
But when HR insists on running the process, the conversation inevitably shifts. It becomes less about transformation and more about templating. Suddenly we’re talking about leveling guides, equity grid thresholds, and whether this job title matches the internal taxonomy.
Top candidates don’t care about your taxonomy. They care about the challenge, the impact, the story. And they can smell bureaucracy from a mile away.
No one ever closed a world-class CPO by promising them a seamless onboarding flow. They were closed by showing them how they’ll shape the company’s future.
If you want A+ talent, you need an A+ process: fast, smart, human, direct. Not six stages of passive-aggressive BS.
It’s Not You, HR… It’s Just That You’re Not the Buyer
This is the part that HR doesn’t like hearing, but it needs to be said clearly, without euphemism or apology: you’re not the buyer.
In strategic hiring the real buyer is the business. Not HR. The buyer is the person whose roadmap will stall if this hire doesn’t happen. The one who owns the P&L. The one who’ll sit across from the board and explain why growth targets weren’t hit because they couldn’t land the right leader in time.
So why, exactly, are we routing every decision through someone who doesn’t carry the risk?
That’s not governance. That’s displacement of accountability. And it’s hurting the business.
You wouldn’t let the wedding planner decide who makes the guest list. They can help manage RSVPs and make sure the catering’s gluten-free, but the guest list? That’s for the couple. And in executive hiring, the “couple” is the COO, the CEO, or the commercial lead. The people who actually know what success looks like.
HR absolutely has a role. An important one. Keep us compliant. Help us craft the offer. Smooth out onboarding. Flag the landmines. But when it comes to defining what “great” looks like, or how fast we need to move, HR shouldn't be the final voice in the room.
You don’t need to be the architect of the house to check that the wiring is safe. Let us build the structure. Let business leaders define the vision. And let HR do what it does best: protect the company while we help build it.
To every HR professional reading this and muttering “not all HR,” we hear you. We know you exist. You’re the ones rolling your eyes internally when someone in your department suggests adding “team player” to the fifth draft of the job description. You’re doing your best within the constraints.
But for the rest of the system: this isn’t about blame. It’s about ownership, and where it doesn’t belong.
Talent Acquisition at the executive level is not an HR support service. It’s not a policy-driven process. It’s a commercial operation. And it needs to be run like one, led by people who understand the business stakes, not just the governance checklists.
You can’t transform a company by squeezing your Chief Product Officer search through the same machinery you use to approve someone’s secondment to the Sydney office.
So, CEOs and COOs, next time you engage a search partner like us, please don’t send us to HR first.