We're Still Hiring Leaders for a World That No Longer Exists

Let me be direct about something the executive hiring world rarely acknowledges.

The way organisations select senior leaders hasn't meaningfully changed in thirty years. Boards define the role. Internal recruiters or executive search firms find candidates who have already done it. Interviews focus on track record, sector experience, and company scale. Maybe there's a psychometric test (all broadly testing for habitual behavioural tendencies). Eventually, someone is appointed who looks most like the leaders who succeeded before them - with very low variance.

For a long time, that was reasonable. Roles were extremely stable, industries evolved slowly, and the future looked a fair bit like the past. Any change was slow.

It isn't anymore. And most of us involved in this process, whether sitting on a board, in the C-Suite, running a search, or making the hire, know it.

Ask yourself one question.

If your organisation were hiring its current CEO today, w

ould the job description look the same as it did five years ago?

Most boards would say no. The environment has changed, the challenges have changed, and the expectations of the role have shifted considerably. Yet the way we evaluate candidates has barely moved at all. That gap, between how leadership roles are evolving and how we assess the people filling them, is where the real risk now sits.

The role has changed. The hiring process hasn't.

AI is advancing faster than most strategic planning cycles can accommodate. Business models that looked unassailable three years ago are being dismantled. The organisations winning today aren't necessarily the most efficient. They're the most adaptable.

Yet when boards hire a senior leader, they still rely on the same signals: past job titles, sector experience, company scale, years in role. These signals tell you how someone performed in a previous environment. They tell you almost nothing about how they'll perform in this one.

Despite a growing body of research pointing to an entirely different set of leadership capabilities, most executive hiring processes remain anchored to traditional proxies for performance. This isn't a search firm problem or a board problem. It's a system problem, and it runs through the entire hiring process.

Some of the roles we're hiring for today didn't exist five years ago.

The Chief AI Officer is perhaps the most visible example of this. What began as a technology appointment has evolved into something far more complex. AI now touches pricing, operations, product design, risk, customer experience, and strategic planning. These leaders aren't running a technology function. They're driving transformation across the entire enterprise.

In the case of the Chief AI Officer, the role may be temporary. If the trajectory of previous technology leadership roles is any guide, as AI becomes embedded across the business, the standalone Chief AI mandate will likely be absorbed into broader executive briefs, the CEO, COO (my guess), CTO/CIO, or Chief Digital Officer. We may be watching an executive role emerge, evolve rapidly, and disappear, all within a few years.

And AI won't be the last example of this. We're entering a period where leadership roles will appear quickly, shift constantly, and sometimes cease to exist altogether. Organisations hiring purely for how a role looks today are already working from an outdated map.

The 40% failure rate. And why it may be getting worse.

Research on executive transitions has consistently found that around 40% of newly appointed leaders fail to meet expectations within 18 months. These rarely announce themselves as dramatic failures. More often the signs are subtle: stalled initiatives, missed expectations, a quiet erosion of board confidence.

That figure was generated under far more stable conditions than leaders are stepping into today. What's increasingly common is a leader being appointed into a role that is actively changing around them, is expected to redefine the job while simultaneously delivering results against it.

The risk isn't hiring the wrong person. It's hiring the right person for a version of the role that no longer exists.

That risk is distributed across the entire process. The leaders who defined the brief. The executive search firm that sourced the candidates. The CHRO who signed off on the criteria. The leadership team that conducted the interviews. This is a system problem, and it calls for a system rethink.

The leaders who succeed share something different.

Across organisations navigating rapid change, a clear pattern emerges. The executives who thrive in fast-evolving roles don't share a sector background or a particular career history. Research on digital transformation leadership points consistently to a different set of qualities: flexible thinking, resilience, the capacity to innovate, and the ability to lead across disciplines rather than within them.

In practice, this shows up in recognisable ways. These leaders absorb new information quickly and adapt without waiting for certainty. They move fluidly across strategy, technology, people, and operations rather than retreating to their functional home ground. They remain composed when the path forward is unclear, and in these roles, ambiguity is not the exception. It's the operating condition. And they build teams capable of adapting alongside them, understanding that no leader navigates this kind of change alone.

The leaders who sustain this over time share one further quality: they actively seek honest feedback, even when hierarchy naturally filters it out. It sounds simple, but it is surprisingly rare.

None of this shows up in a CV. Most hiring processes aren't designed to surface it.

We describe this cluster of capabilities as Growth Capacity: The capability of an individual to continually develop their thinking, behaviour, and leadership impact in response to new information, feedback, complexity, and changing environments.

The question the whole industry needs to start asking.

Executive hiring has long been organised around one central question: has this person done this job before?

It's a reasonable question. But it's the wrong one.

The question that matters more is whether a leader has the capacity to grow as the role changes around them. Whether they can shape the job as much as the job shapes them.

Answering that well requires change at every stage. A brief that defines the capabilities needed for the role as it will be, not just as it has been. A search focused less on replicating past profiles and more on identifying Growth Capacity. An assessment framework designed to understand how a leader operates when the environment shifts beneath them. And a structured onboarding process, because the first six months of any executive transition is where things most often go wrong, and it is consistently the period that receives the least support.

At Vantyr Group, this sits at the centre of our work. We partner with organisations to identify and appoint leaders built for the environment that is still emerging, combining executive search with structured leadership & character strength assessment and coaching newly appointed leaders through the critical early months of their transition.

But the broader conversation belongs to the whole industry.

The organisations, boards, and search partners that learn to ask the right question will carry a genuine advantage into the years ahead. Those still running the old playbook will keep arriving at the same problem.

Yesterday's leader. Tomorrow's role.

Vantyr Group partners with organisations to identify and appoint leaders built for the environment that's still emerging, not just the one we're in today.