The brief is the search

When a search stalls, the easy explanation is that the market is thin. Occasionally that is true. More often the brief was a list of qualities rather than a description of a job, the four people on the panel each pictured a different role, and the first candidates were rejected for reasons that were never written down and so kept recurring.

So we spend the first week on the brief and treat it as the deliverable it is. Not the advertisement, the internal version: the three things this person is accountable for in the first year, the two areas where the client will flex on background, and the one where they will not.

That document does two jobs. It gives every interviewer the same measure, so their feedback can actually be compared. And it lets the client reject a strong candidate quickly and be able to say why in a sentence, which is what keeps a search moving.

A board that cannot describe the first year of a role in three plain sentences is not ready to hire for it. Helping write those sentences is the start of the engagement, not the throat-clearing before it.