Almost every search I run starts the same way. I read the brief, and then I start asking questions the brief hasn’t answered. What does commercial success look like in 12 months? What is the candidate walking into? Who needs to agree on this hire, and do they actually agree? Not all the right questions have been asked yet, and until they are, the brief is more of a wish list of experience and characteristics.
If a technology leadership brief is wrong before the search has started, everything that comes after is measured against that.
What most briefs are built from
Most role PDs are put together by looking at what the function does today, what the last person did, and what they think is missing. That is a reasonable starting point for a junior hire. But for a senior technology leadership appointment, it produces a document that describes the problem as it was, not the role as it needs to be.
A CIO leading enterprise platform transformation is a completely different hire from a CIO maintaining a stable IT function in the same business two years earlier. Same title. Fundamentally different mandate. Most businesses have never had a commercially grounded technology leader, so they don’t know how to brief for one. The brief describes the technical function because that’s all they’ve seen the role do. A brief written without interrogating that difference runs a search against the wrong question with great confidence, and surfaces candidates who fit the shape of the role rather than the demands of the situation.
The search runs, someone gets hired. And the question of whether that person can do the job as it needs to be done, in this specific context, at this specific moment, was never properly asked.
Three things that are consistently missing
There are three gaps in most technology leadership briefs that produce a poor outcome.
The first is a clear definition of what success looks like at 12 months. This sounds obvious, but I don’t mean “lead the technology function” or “drive digital transformation,” but what has changed: what has been delivered, what the organisation can do now that it couldn’t before, what the board will point to as evidence the hire worked. Without that, assessment relies on pattern-matching experience against a job title instead of testing against the real business outcomes that need solving.
The second is an honest description of what the candidate is walking into. A transformation mandate on top of a huge legacy estate, poor relationships and results from vendors, as well as an inherited team built for BAU is a specific type of problem. The leaders who operate well in that environment are not the same ones who thrive in a greenfield build or a “steady the ship” context. Briefs that don’t address the difficulty, or that don’t fully understand it themselves, will likely produce candidates who are surprised by the reality when they join and will likely lose momentum within the first six months.
The third is alignment. In most searches, the CEO, the board, and the rest of the SLT all have different views on what the role should be. Those differences often only come up late in the process when weeks or months have been spent getting there. Getting agreement from every decision maker before the search goes to market is not just good practice. It determines whether the search is worth running. I have seen strong shortlists go nowhere because two stakeholders with equal weight in the process had completely different ideas about what the hire was supposed to solve, and neither of them knew the other disagreed until it was too late.
What getting it wrong costs
A senior technology leadership search usually runs three to six months from brief to start date. At CIO or CTO level, total cost including fee, transition time, and productivity ramp could be well over $500,000. A bad brief does not always end up with a hire who obviously fails. It produces a hire who performs alright for 12 to 18 months before the gap between the role as it was described and the business as it actually operates becomes impossible to ignore.
The brief is where that gap starts. By the time it comes up, the cost in time, money, and organisational momentum is already spent.
What a properly scoped brief does
A brief built on the right questions defines the success criteria in commercial terms, not functional ones. And it sets out how success gets measured, in direct detail specific enough to hold the hire accountable.
It names every decision maker and establishes what each of them needs from the hire.
It describes what the candidate is walking into honestly, warts and all.
Building that brief means a proper intake process: structured conversations with the CEO, relevant board members, and the key peers the new hire will need to work with. A single call with the hiring manager won’t give you what you need.
That investment upfront streamlines everything that follows. A search that starts against a proper scope produces a shortlist that everybody can agree on, candidates who understand what they are accepting, and placements that stick.
Frequently asked questions
The time investment in getting the brief right is not preparation for the search. It is the search. Everything else runs faster and produces better outcomes when the foundation is right.
If you are about to start a technology leadership search, the question is not who do we know. It is: does everyone who needs to agree on this hire actually agree on what they are hiring for?