The Corelation

The Corelation, an executive search firm in India

CXO and leadership hiring that starts with the leader, not the job

The Corelation, an executive search firm in India, hires CXOs and functional leaders by briefing the founder or CEO they will report to before anything else, because compatibility with that person decides more of the outcome than the job description does.

Why does the reporting relationship decide a CXO hire?

A CXO hire succeeds or fails on whether the person can do their best work under the founder or CEO they report to, because at that level capability is already established and the relationship is the variable left over.

Think about what a chief marketing officer or chief financial officer actually does in their first months. They inherit a function, form a view, and then take that view to one person. How that person receives it, how much room they give, whether they want to be told or asked, whether they want a builder or a finisher: that is the job, more than the function is. A CFO who is superb at the work but reads the CEO wrong will be sidelined within months. The same CFO under a CEO they read well becomes the person the business cannot run without.

Most searches describe the job in detail and the leader barely at all. So the search optimises against an incomplete picture, and the mismatch surfaces a few months in, usually labelled as culture. It is rarely culture. It is compatibility, and it was knowable up front.

What should a CXO brief cover?

A CXO brief should describe the person the hire will report to and the real condition of the function, not only the responsibilities of the role.

The job description is the easy part, and most companies already have one. What is usually missing is a plain account of the leader: how they take decisions, which calls they will always make themselves, how they react to being told they are wrong, how quickly they change direction, what the last person in the seat found hard, and where they know they need to be complemented. Then the stage: what exists in the function and what does not, whether the hire is building or running, and who actually decides when the leader is not in the room.

We call the first of these the leader brief. A leader brief is a structured conversation with the person a hire will report to, conducted before sourcing begins. Almost no search firm runs one, and most founders and CEOs enjoy being asked. The second is the stage brief, and together they are what we read every candidate against. The full sequence is on how we work, beginning with the leader brief.

What does compatibility look like in practice?

Compatibility is whether a particular leader and a particular hire bring out each other's best work, and it shows up in decision style, in how feedback travels and in how much room the leader gives.

A hypothetical. A founder who has run her company's marketing herself for years is finally hiring a CMO. She says she wants someone to own it. In the leader brief it becomes clear that she still wants to approve every campaign, that she reads performance data daily and that she thinks in terms of the brand's voice, which she created. A CMO who has run large teams with full autonomy will experience this as interference and leave. A CMO who enjoys working closely with a founder who cares about the craft, and who can earn autonomy over time by being right, will thrive. Both are capable. Only one fits.

A second hypothetical, in the other direction. A CEO who delegates almost entirely and wants to hear from his CFO once a month unless something is wrong. A finance leader who needs regular contact to feel trusted will read the silence as disinterest and start to drift. One who treats the room as respect will do the best work of their career. The job description was identical in both cases. The brief that mattered was the one about the leader.

How does functional leadership hiring differ from CXO hiring?

Functional leadership hiring applies the same four Cs, but the leader in the brief is a CXO rather than the founder, and that person's way of working is what the hire has to fit.

A head of sales reporting to a chief revenue officer, a head of brand reporting to a CMO, a controller reporting to a CFO: these are the hires that build the layer beneath a leadership team, and they go wrong for the same reasons CXO hires do. The CXO often has less practice at describing how they lead than a founder does, which makes the leader brief more useful, not less. We run it the same way, with the actual manager and not with HR standing in for them.

Company stage still applies here, and it is frequently misjudged. A CXO who joined from a large company will often try to hire the strong deputy they had there, without noticing that the deputy was strong inside a structure that does not exist yet in the new place. Part of our job is to say so.

Why is company stage a skill in a leadership hire?

Company stage is a skill in its own right because the temperament that thrives when nothing exists yet is different from the one that thrives inside a resourced, process-led organisation, and a CV does not show which one a leader has.

Someone excellent in a structured business can struggle where there is no team, no budget cycle and no predecessor's work to build on. The reverse is just as true. This is not seniority or ambition. It is operating temperament: tolerance for ambiguity, comfort building from zero, willingness to work below your title for a while. A good conversation will surface it. A job description will not, and a capability screen does not ask.

How does The Corelation run a CXO search?

We brief the hiring manager before we brief the market.

  1. The leader brief with the founder or CEO, before any sourcing.
  2. The stage brief: what exists, what does not, who decides.
  3. Capability assessment, evidence-based, with a senior operator from our network where the function needs it.
  4. The fit conversation, where candidates are read against the leader and the stage.
  5. A two-way view: candidates hear the real version of the role and the leader.
  6. The handover note on how to work well with the person you have hired.
  7. The 90-day check-in with both sides, alongside the three-month guarantee.

The seventh step is where we learn what to do differently next time, and it is also where a wobble in the first quarter usually gets fixed rather than becoming a replacement. The mandates and industries we cover are on who we work with, and the broader case for running a search this way is on executive search in India.

Isn't this just a good interviewer's instinct?

No. The judgement is structured: the leader's answers are recorded before the search starts, and each candidate is compared against them, so the reasoning for every name on the shortlist can be written down and challenged.

Instinct is what happens when the leader meets the candidate for an hour and decides. What we offer is the opposite: the leader's own account of how they work, gathered when no candidate is in the room, used as the standard the shortlist is held to. The method is the proof, and it is open to you throughout.

Questions founders ask

What should a CXO brief cover?

The role, and then the things most briefs leave out: how the person the hire reports to decides, what they delegate and what they hold close, how they like to be challenged, what the last person in the seat found hard, and what a strong first few months would look like in their head. Add the real condition of the function, team and systems. That is a brief a candidate can be read against.

How do you assess compatibility without it being guesswork?

We gather structured input from the hiring leader before sourcing and write it down. Candidates are then asked about how they have worked with leaders of that kind, where it went well and where it did not, and the answers are compared against what the leader told us. The reasoning for every name is written. If a judgement cannot be traced to something either side said, it does not count.

Does the founder have to be involved personally?

If the hire reports to the founder, yes, for the leader brief at least. It takes a conversation, not a programme of meetings, and most founders find it a useful exercise in its own right. If the hire reports to a CXO rather than the founder, the leader brief is with that CXO. We do not run a leader brief with HR as a stand-in for the actual manager.

What roles count as functional leadership?

Heads of a function who report to a CXO or directly to a founder: sales, marketing, finance, operations, supply chain, product, people, technology and their equivalents. The role may not carry a chief title, but the person will build or run a team and will be judged on how well they work with the leader above them. The same four Cs apply.

Do you tell candidates what the founder is really like?

Yes, with the founder's knowledge. Candidates hear the real version: what is still being built, how the leader decides and gives feedback, and where the previous person found it difficult. It costs us a few candidates who would not have thrived, and it saves most of the placements that would otherwise fail around the fourth month for reasons nobody said out loud.

What do we receive at the end of a CXO search besides the hire?

A handover note: a short written read on how to work well with the person you have hired, what motivates them, how they take feedback and what tends to disengage them. Then a 90-day check-in with you and with them, separately, at the three-month mark, which runs alongside the three-month replacement guarantee. Both are part of the search, not extras.

  • How we work

    The leader brief, the stage brief, the fit conversation and the handover note, step by step.

  • Executive search in India

    How boutique search differs from contingency recruitment, and what a search on the four Cs looks like.

  • Who we work with

    Mid-senior to CXO mandates across industries, with senior operators assessing alongside us.

  • The brief nobody writes

    Interviewing the hiring manager: what the leader brief asks and what you learn from it.

Start a search

Tell us about the role and the person it will report to. We will come back with a view on how we would run the search, and an honest answer on whether we are the right firm for it.

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Or write to hello@thecorelation.com