I Am Not From HR. Your Shortlist Should Care.
Most search firms are run by people who grew up in HR, either inside a company or as an outside supplier to one. That is not a criticism. It is a description of where they stood: for most of their careers, they talked about hiring and watched it from the side.
That position shapes how a candidate is seen, how a candidate is judged, and above all how a candidate is ruled out.
Where good people fall
I keep meeting strong people who failed a first screen for reasons that had nothing to do with the job. Someone who has not interviewed in fourteen years, because for fourteen years nobody needed to interview them. Someone who answered a question with a definition instead of a story. Someone who stumbled on a word in a second language.
A screen built from the side catches those moments, because they are the moments it can see. The work, the judgement, the ownership, the things you are actually hiring for, sit further in, and the screen never reaches them.
Hiring from the other side of the table
For nearly two decades I built and led product and technology organisations. That means I was the one hiring: writing the brief, reading the CVs, running the interviews, making the offer, and living with the result for the two years afterwards.
That is the seat I search from. I am looking for what you would look for if you had the time, and I look past what you would forgive in the room.
What that changes in practice
You meet few people. One, two, three. Not a list of thirty and good luck. Your time is the most expensive part of any search, and a long list only moves the filtering from my desk to yours.
I work to your objective, not to the job description. A job description is a guess written before the search taught anyone anything. If the right person comes from a different background than the one on the page, I will bring them and tell you why.
I stay close. A phone call two or three times a week, a sharpening question, a visit to your office to meet the people the hire will work beside. Those conversations are where the brief becomes accurate.
The test
Ask anyone running a search for you one question: when did you last make an offer, and live with the result? The answer tells you which side of the table they will be searching from.
The right person exists. Let’s find them.