You Don’t Have a Talent Problem. You Have a Clarity Problem.

Every founder, CEO or investor eventually finds themselves saying it:

“We just can’t find the right talent.”

“No one’s quite the right fit.”

“The market’s dry.”

But more often than not, the issue isn’t the talent pool. It’s the brief, and the strategic fog surrounding it.

The Leadership Mirage

Let’s say you're a scaling fintech or restructuring a portfolio company after a performance dip. You put the word out: “We need a new COO — someone strategic, operationally excellent, culturally aligned.”

The request sounds clear, but it isn’t.

• Are you looking for a builder or a stabiliser?

• A future CEO-in-waiting or a low-ego executor?

• Someone to challenge the founder/CEO, or quietly enable them?

When the leadership team and board aren’t aligned on these nuances, you’re not hiring from clarity. You’re hiring from assumption. And assumptions are expensive.

The Real Cost of Ambiguity

According to McKinsey & Company, one of the most common reasons senior appointments fail is not lack of capability — it’s a lack of role clarity and alignment on success expectations.

“Companies often lack a clear view of what they’re looking for in a new CEO. As a result, they end up hiring someone who’s not well suited to the role.”— McKinsey, 2021

When you ask for everything, you get nothing — or worse, you get a candidate who interviews brilliantly but lands awkwardly. Because the role they were sold doesn’t match the political or operational reality.

That’s not a talent failure. That’s a clarity failure.

Flipping the Brief

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a leading authority on executive selection, has long argued that in volatile and complex environments, contextual intelligence and learning agility matter far more than past experience.

“In this new era, potential matters more than credentials, and the ability to adapt is the key to success.”— Harvard Business Review, 2014

So instead of asking, “Who do we want?”, the better question is:

“What are we solving for?”

That could be:

• Turning around a fatigued culture.

• Aligning commercial and product strategy.

• Building a team that can scale globally.

  
  

Only once the business need is clear can you define the kind of leadership required — and the kinds of candidate that won’t work, no matter how impressive their résumé.

What Clarity Actually Looks Like

✅ A shared, explicit understanding between board, CEO and advisors of what success looks like — not just deliverables, but behaviours.

✅ A clear articulation of the business context — inflection points, risks, team dynamics, power dynamics.

✅ Agreement on what not to hire — the derailers, political mismatches, or patterns that have burned the business before, or have burned the competition.

This is where most leadership searches go wrong. They race to market before aligning internally.

The Takeaway

There isn't a talent shortage. There's a thinking shortage.

At Vantyr Group, we help boards, executives and investors get razor-sharp on the problem they’re actually solving — and only then do we search. Because once the clarity is there, the right leadership is never far behind.