Crucial Hire
Six Common Mistakes When Hiring a CHRO
These six cost more than the search fee. They cost the hire, and then they cost the two years it takes to recover from it.
The short answer
The six most common mistakes companies make when hiring a CHRO are:
- Starting with a job description instead of the outcomes the first eighteen months have to produce
- Over-specifying the candidate, which screens out capable leaders and advances box-checkers
- Evaluating without a structured framework, so the best interviewer wins rather than the best leader
- Checking references only with former bosses and never with former peers
- Underestimating both the compensation and the calendar
- Assuming the strongest candidate will apply
Every one of them is avoidable, and every one of them is decided before the first candidate conversation happens.
A CHRO hire that does not work costs more than any other executive mistake, and it costs it quietly.
A weak CFO shows up in the numbers. A weak COO shows up in operations. A weak CHRO shows up two years later in turnover you cannot explain, a leadership bench that never developed, and a management team that stopped bringing hard problems to HR. By the time it is visible, it has been true for a long time.
The good news is that these failures are almost never mysterious. Six patterns account for most of them, and all six are decided before anyone is interviewed.
Mistake OneStarting with the job description
Most CHRO searches open with a document describing the job. That is backward, because a job description describes activity rather than results, and activity is not what you are hiring for.
Start instead with three to five measurable outcomes for the first twelve to eighteen months. The outcomes define the requirements. The requirements define the search. Written the other way around, you end up with a list of duties that any competent HR executive could claim, and no way to tell them apart.
Oversees all human resources functions including talent acquisition, compensation, benefits, employee relations, and organizational development.
True of every CHRO alive. Screens for nobody.
Cut voluntary turnover in the plants by a defined amount within eighteen months. Build a succession bench for the top forty roles. Get the compensation structure to market without blowing the budget.
Now the interview has something to test.
Mistake TwoOver-specifying the candidate
Fifteen years in your exact industry, at your exact employee count, with a CHRO title already on the resume. Requirements like these feel rigorous. What they actually do is eliminate capable leaders and advance people who check boxes without carrying substance.
Separate what must be true from what would be nice. A strong CHRO leads across industries when the foundation is right, and the foundation is usually about the employee population rather than the logo. Someone who has run HR for a distributed hourly workforce can run HR for a different distributed hourly workforce. Someone who has only supported corporate professionals cannot, regardless of how familiar the industry name sounds.
Industry name. Company size. Current title. Years in seat.
These are proxies, and every one of them can be true of a leader who will fail in your seat.
Employee population handled. Complexity survived. Whether they built the function or inherited it. What happened to the people they hired.
Mistake ThreeHiring the interviewer instead of the leader
Without a structured evaluation framework, the most charismatic candidate wins. That is the single most expensive hiring mistake available in executive HR, because the gap between interview performance and leadership performance is wider in this function than in any other.
Consider why. A CHRO’s job includes reading rooms, managing difficult conversations, and presenting persuasively to skeptical audiences. Those are the exact skills an interview measures. Which means a strong interviewer in HR may be demonstrating the job, or may be demonstrating only the interview, and you cannot tell the difference without a framework that forces the question.
Score every candidate on the same defined criteria, in writing, before anyone compares notes. The point is not bureaucracy. The point is that the framework survives the room, and impressions do not.
Two candidates can give equally impressive interviews. Only one of them has a track record of people who got promoted after working for them.
Mistake FourSkipping peer references
Reference calls with former CEOs are useful and they come with an agenda. Nobody wants to speak badly of an executive they hired, and a glowing reference sometimes means the person was easy to manage rather than effective.
The reference worth the most is a former peer. Someone who sat at the leadership table in the adjacent seat, watched the candidate’s judgment under pressure, and had to work with the results. Peers see what bosses do not: whether the person is credible when the room is hard, whether they own mistakes, whether operations actually trusted them.
A former CEO who says the candidate was terrific, a real partner, and would be an asset to any organization.
Kind, sincere, and completely non-predictive.
A former CFO or COO, asked what happened the last time the candidate was wrong, and which of the candidate’s hires are still there.
Specific questions produce specific answers.
Mistake FiveUnderestimating the compensation and the calendar
Guessing wrong on either number kills searches in the middle, after the executive team has already invested a quarter in the process.
On compensation, know the real market for your geography and your employee population before the search opens, including base and target bonus rather than base alone. A range that moves in month four costs you finalists and costs you credibility with everyone who saw the first number.
On the calendar, plan four to six months from decision to offer, plus another sixty to ninety days for a sitting executive to resign properly. That is the honest arithmetic, and it is covered in more detail in how much notice a retiring CHRO should give.
Mistake SixBelieving the best candidate will apply
The CHRO who would transform your business is not reading job boards. They are running a function, trusted inside their company, known by name to their own CEO, and not looking.
A posting reaches people who are searching. Some of them are excellent. But the search that relies on posting and waiting is selecting from whoever happened to be available, which is a different population than the best available, and the difference compounds over the next decade.
Selects from candidates who are actively looking, then treats volume as evidence the market was covered.
Identifies the people who fit, reaches them directly, and gives them a reason to take the call. The whole market, not the available slice of it.
How do you avoid all six?
The sequence, in order
- Write the outcomes first. Three to five, measurable, for the first eighteen months.
- Split must-have from nice-to-have. Screen on employee population and complexity, not on industry name.
- Build the scorecard before you interview. Same criteria, written scores, no comparing notes until everyone has submitted.
- Call a peer. At least one former CFO, COO, or business unit leader per finalist.
- Confirm the number and the calendar. Real market compensation, and a timeline that includes the candidate’s own notice period.
- Go get the people who are not applying. Everything above is wasted on a pool that selected itself.
None of this is complicated. All of it is decided early, which is why the mistakes are so durable. By the time a search is struggling, the decisions that caused it are three months old and nobody connects them.
Get the first six right and the seventh takes care of itself: a leader who is still in the seat, running a bigger function, 4 to 10+ years from now.
Opening a CHRO search?
Thirty minutes, confidential, and you will leave with the outcomes and the scorecard whether or not we ever do business.
Book a Strategic Talent CallRelated reading
- Replacing a Retiring CHRO
- How Much Notice Should a Retiring CHRO Give?
- How to Find a Great HR Leader
Zach Nold is the founder and Chief Talent Officer of Crucial Hire, an executive search firm in Chicago, Illinois that places HR leadership exclusively, from HR Manager through CHRO, for companies across the United States. Engagement structures and guarantee terms are listed on the pricing page.
