A strong shortlist against a brief that had moved
A mid sized media business had already run a search for a commercial director. It produced a strong shortlist and no appointment. Everybody they met could do the job as the specification described it, and the specification described the role as it had been. The business was shifting where its revenue came from, and the person it needed had to deliver inside that shift rather than run the model the business was leaving behind.
Leadership hiring comes apart at the brief far more often than at the interview, and it is much harder to notice there. More candidates would not have fixed it. Fixing it meant going back to the requirement before going back to the market.
We rewrote the brief before reopening the search
We reworked the specification around the transition the business was actually making, then mapped the market for people who had led that same shift somewhere else. The mapping came before anybody was approached. That order matters: the business knew how large the genuinely relevant population was before it started, which changed what it expected of the timeline.
It also showed that the population was small and real, which is a far better position to be in than the impression the first search had left. We spoke with former commercial directors, partnership leads and sales directors, and the search prioritized people who had led the same transition over people who had held the same title. Candidates cleared the Nextyn compliance framework before introduction.
An appointment the first search could not have produced
The business appointed a commercial director who had already led a comparable revenue model shift at another media business. The useful part of the work sat in the diagnosis rather than in the outcome. The first search had been run competently against a brief that no longer described the business, and no amount of additional candidates would have corrected that.
The market mapping was kept, so the next commercial appointment starts from a picture of the field rather than from a blank page.
