By Alessio Montaruli, Founder and Group CEO, KiTalent

 

Executive recruiting is a research-led process for filling senior roles, where the firm identifies and approaches leaders who are not applying for anything, then assesses them against the specific demands of one organisation. It differs from ordinary recruitment less in seniority than in the question it has to answer: not only what a person can do, but who they are in relation to this particular company.

 

 

## The two questions a senior hire actually turns on

 

Most hiring processes answer one question well: **what can this person do?** That is capability. It covers technical skill, functional depth and management experience, it leaves verifiable traces on a CV, it can be benchmarked, and it responds to training. Ordinary recruitment is built to assess it, and it is usually right.

 

Senior hiring turns on a second question that the first process is not built for: **who is this person, in relation to this organisation?** That is identity. It covers values, motivation, the genuine reasons someone wants this role at this moment, and how they decide when the situation is unclear. It is not on the CV, it changes slowly if at all, and it is where most senior appointments actually fail.

 

I call this the capability–identity distinction, and it is the reason executive recruiting exists as a separate discipline. If seniority were only a matter of more experience, a longer version of normal recruitment would be enough. It is not, because the second question needs a different kind of evidence: decisional patterns gathered across several conversations, rather than a score against a job description.

 

 

## What the process involves

 

A credible executive search does four things that ordinary recruitment usually does not.

 

**It maps before it approaches.** The firm establishes who exists in the relevant market, where they sit and how that market is shaped, before making contact. This matters because the strongest candidates for a senior role are rarely applying for one. They are doing the job well somewhere else.

 

**It approaches people directly.** Most of the field is passive. Reaching them means a considered approach to a named individual, not a posting that waits for a response.

 

**It assesses in two registers.** Capability against the operating reality of the role, and identity against how this specific organisation actually decides, escalates and behaves under pressure. These are best run as separate conversations, because mixing them lets interview fluency contaminate the read on competence.

 

**It presents evidence, not enthusiasm.** A shortlist should let the hiring group weigh capability and identity independently, rather than collapsing both into a single fit score that hides the judgement.

 

 

## Why the distinction matters commercially

 

The expensive mistake in senior hiring is rarely hiring someone incapable. Screening catches that. The expensive mistake is hiring someone capable who is the wrong person for this role, in this organisation, at this moment. That person passes every competency check and leaves within eighteen months, and the post-mortem usually identifies causes that were visible at the time but were never surfaced by the process.

 

There is a second, subtler failure. When an interviewer asks a candidate to describe their leadership style, they generally believe they are assessing identity. In practice they are assessing articulation: how fluently the candidate can describe a leadership style. The candidate who answers most smoothly is very often the one who has rehearsed the answer most often. Fluent candidates are systematically overrated and reflective ones underrated, which is why a single conversation is a weak instrument for the question that matters most.

 

 

## When a company should use executive recruiting

 

It earns its cost in a narrower set of situations than the industry usually implies:

 

- Senior or specialist roles where the qualified pool is genuinely small

- Leadership hires where the operating context is unusual or in transition

- Appointments with a complex stakeholder environment

- Confidential searches, including replacements and succession

- Cross-border hires, where a leader who thrives in one market is not automatically the same leader in another

- Situations where the cost of a wrong appointment is measured in strategy and team damage rather than in recruitment fees

 

 

## When it is not the right approach

 

This matters as much as the list above, and it is worth being direct about it.

 

For high-volume hiring, for junior and mid-level roles, and for well-defined technical positions where the job is clearly specified and the variance between capable candidates is small, a structured internal process is proportionate and often better. The role is legible, the pool is deep and a mis-hire is recoverable. Paying for a research-led search there is buying an instrument the problem does not require.

 

Equally, if a company already has strong internal talent acquisition, a good candidate network in its sector, and time to run the process properly, it may not need an external firm at all. An honest search firm will say so.

 

 

## The underlying point

 

Executive recruiting is not ordinary recruitment applied to bigger titles. It is a different discipline because it answers a different question, and that question cannot be answered from a document. A profile represents a candidate; it cannot judge one. The work of judgement begins where representation stops.

 

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*Alessio Montaruli is Founder and Group CEO of [KiTalent](https://kitalent.com/), an international executive search firm operating from Turin, Nicosia, Larnaca, Almaty and New York. He writes on assessment, identity and the limits of AI in senior hiring. The argument above is developed in [The Capability-Identity Distinction in Executive Hiring](https://kitalent.com/research/capability-identity-distinction-executive-hiring).*