Practitioner note — Kenneth Saxskiold-Nørup

What I am actually trying to understand.

Not whether a candidate is impressive. Whether this person is likely to create the required outcomes in this role, in this organisation.

In short

How do experienced headhunters judge a senior candidate?

By asking whether this person is likely to produce the required outcomes in this specific role and organisation, rather than whether they are impressive. The working distinction is between impression and evidence: what a candidate conveys in a room, against what they have demonstrably done, under what conditions, and how consistently the pattern repeats across different contexts. Judgement then concerns transfer — which of the conditions that enabled past performance exist here — and it ends by stating what the evidence does not cover, because the unresolved part of a senior appointment is the part worth naming out loud.

Evidence and impression are not the same material

A CV is a narrative someone has authored about themselves. An interview is a performance under conditions the organisation controls. Both are useful, and neither is the thing I am trying to reach. What I am looking for underneath them is demonstrated evidence: decisions made, with what information, against what resistance, and what followed.

The signal I trust most is pattern consistency. One strong result may be circumstance. The same judgement appearing across different settings — different sectors, different degrees of support, different pressure — is closer to character. And the pattern still has to be relevant here: a leader may be genuinely excellent at something this role will not ask for.

Past success does not automatically transfer

Performance is partly a property of a system. The team was already strong; the market was growing; the chair absorbed the political weight; the function had matured just enough to be led rather than built. Remove one of those conditions and the same person can look like a different leader.

So the question is rarely "did this work before?" but "what made it work, and how much of that exists here?" That is a question about the organisation as much as about the candidate — which is why the preparation before the market is approached carries so much of the eventual outcome. The process behind that reading is set out movement by movement.

What testing can and cannot tell me

Structured assessment earns its place by doing three things well: it challenges assumptions I have already formed, it reveals patterns a conversation would not surface, and it produces better questions for the next conversation.

It cannot make the appointment decision, replace judgement, or predict how a person will behave in a context the instrument has never seen. An instrument result is evidence to be interpreted against the role, not a verdict. What assessment can and cannot establish is stated in its own terms.

Disagreement is usually information

When two assessors or two board members reach different conclusions about the same candidate, the disagreement is often treated as a problem to be resolved before the decision. More often it is the most useful evidence in the room. It tends to mean the two are weighting different things, or holding different assumptions about what the role is for.

My interest is in what each person is reading, not in producing alignment quickly. Alignment reached too early usually reappears eighteen months later as surprise.

What remains uncertain

A serious process reduces uncertainty. It does not eliminate it. What it can do is make the remaining uncertainty visible and decision-relevant: here is what we know, here is what we infer, here is what we do not know and would only learn in the role.

Written down honestly, that becomes useful after the appointment too — it tells the organisation what to support and what to watch in the first year.

When I would advise against an appointment

Sometimes the right professional advice is not to appoint — including when the candidate in question is one we introduced. A presented shortlist is a proposal, not a commitment, and a firm that cannot say so has made its own commercial position part of the client's evidence.

The same applies at the final stage, where two credible finalists can make the decision feel settled before it has been made. How a board compares two strong finalists takes that moment on its own, and Executive Search sets out when and how we advise against.