Confidential Hiring: What Goes Wrong Before, During and After the Hire
On 22 October we closed the 2026 Future of Leadership series with the subject the community had come back to all year. Ninety-four senior leaders have now joined the series across 14 countries, and the final session brought together founders, CHROs, and global talent leaders who had all run a search like this. Nicki Paterson, […]
Who Owns a Great Hire? Our First Hiring Circles Webinar
On 5 November we ran the first live webinar inside Hiring Circles, the free community Solutions Driven recently launched for business leaders, people leaders, talent teams, and anyone else with a hand in hiring. Our CEO, Gavin Speirs, spent 45 minutes on a question that comes up in some form on almost every scoping call […]
Confidential Executive Search: Replacing a Leader Quietly
Some leadership changes cannot be announced until they are finished, and that is when a confidential executive search is needed. The board has made its decision, and the people most likely to react badly to the news still do not know. Running a search in that gap takes a different kind of discipline from an […]
What To Do When Your Preferred Candidate Is Counter-Offered
The offer goes out on Tuesday, the candidate accepts Wednesday, and late on Friday they call to say their employer has asked them to stay and has put a number on it. Four months of search sits on whatever gets said in that conversation. Most businesses go into it without having thought about it in […]
What a Hiring Scorecard Looks Like, and the Problems It Solves
If you have never come across a hiring scorecard, the simplest way to describe it is this: it goes well beyond hiring someone because they match the job description. Most hiring managers have been there. A hire does not work out, you go back to the job description, and the person ticked most, if not […]
Hiring Circles: Our New Community
For the last three years, we have run a roundtable every quarter, alongside webinars. Those conversations have been useful to us and to the people who attend. Hiring Circles gives everyone a way to have them more often. Hiring Circles is a community for the people who shape how organisations hire: CEOs, chief people officers, […]
What Candidates Look For in an Employer Now
In the last quarter of 2023, 85% of candidates accepted the job offer they were given. By the end of 2025, that figure had fallen to 48%, according to Gartner research. OFFER ACCEPTANCE RATEQ4 202385%Q4 202548%Source: Gartner. Directional, not plotted to scale. In other words, more than half of the people employers chose, interviewed, and […]
How to Run a Post-Mortem on a Hire That Didn’t Work
If a newly hired director leaves at month 11. The role goes back on the market with the same specification, and the search is run again by the people who completed the last. What businesses almost never do in between is a proper examination of how the original decision was made and exactly why the […]
The Wisdom Gap: The Hiring Problem Nobody Owns
The ageing workforce argument has been made so often that most leadership teams have stopped hearing it. Everyone accepts that more people will leave industrial, energy, life sciences, and technology businesses over the next decade than will join them. The figure goes on a slideshow for a leadership meeting, everyone agrees it is a concern, […]
Pharma Hiring 2026: Insights and Challenges
Large pharma spent 2025 cutting jobs and still cannot fill the senior roles it needs most. Almost all those cuts landed in commercial and support functions. The vacancies that will not close are in regulatory affairs, quality, technical operations and CMC, the chemistry and manufacturing work that sits behind a filing. Regulatory affairs shows the […]