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When a shortlist comes back uniform, the explanation offered is almost always that the pipeline is thin. Occasionally that is true. More often the brief contained requirements that filtered the market before anyone was approached, and nobody examined them because they read as neutral.
Requiring a specific competitor set, a particular institution, or continuous service without a career break. Each sounds like a standard for quality and each removes populations for reasons unrelated to capability.
Insisting on someone who already holds the same title. In functions where representation is thin at the top, this guarantees the shortlist reproduces the existing distribution, because you are recruiting from the layer that has the problem.
Networks are homophilous. A search run mainly through the hiring executive's contacts returns people like the hiring executive, reliably and without anyone intending it.
Free-form conversation rewards familiarity and shared reference points. Structured assessment against the brief is the single most effective correction available, and it improves the quality of every hire, not only diverse ones.
The work is done at mapping stage, not at shortlist stage. If the population you researched was narrow, no amount of care later recovers it, and adding candidates late to correct the balance of a list is visible to everyone including the candidates. Mapping deliberately includes adjacent sectors, people one level below the title who are running equivalent scope, and returners whose continuous service was interrupted.
Assessment is then identical for every candidate: same structured questions, same evidence standard, same written record. The point of structure is not fairness as a gesture. It is that unstructured interviewing is a poor predictor of performance for anyone, and the noise it introduces falls unevenly.
We do not run quota shortlists. Presenting a candidate who cannot win the role in order to make a list look balanced wastes that person's time, damages your reputation with exactly the population you are trying to reach, and is discovered. Every candidate we present is presented because they could be appointed.
We also cannot fix retention with recruitment. If people join and leave within two years, the appointment is not the problem and a better search will not address it. That is an organisational question about who gets sponsored, heard and promoted once inside, and it is worth answering before spending money on another search.
No. We commit to the breadth of the population researched, which is the thing that actually determines the shortlist. A quota applied at shortlist stage produces candidates who cannot win, which is worse than doing nothing.
Sourcing broadly and assessing consistently is not a preference and raises no issue. Selection decisions made on protected characteristics are a different matter and vary by jurisdiction, and for a multinational the position may differ between your markets. Take that advice from counsel rather than from a search firm.
Then the honest answer is that the population at that exact title is thin, and the useful response is to look one level down at people running equivalent scope, and at adjacent sectors where the underlying capability transfers. That widens the map considerably. It also means accepting a candidate who has not held the identical title, which is the actual decision in front of you.
As a fact about a timeline, not a signal about capability. Continuous service is not a competence. We map returners deliberately, because a requirement for unbroken tenure removes a large and capable population for reasons that have nothing to do with the job.
Yes, and it is often more useful than starting again. We look at how the population was built, what the brief screened out and how assessment was recorded. Usually the narrowing is traceable to two or three specific requirements nobody questioned.
Mapping a wider population takes longer than working a network. Structured assessment does not. In our experience the time is recovered later, because shortlists built from a properly researched population survive scrutiny rather than collapsing and restarting.
Tell us about the mandate or challenge you are facing and we will show you what a tailor-made, partner-led engagement really looks like.