What makes hiring for a health and wellness brand different?
Health and wellness brands sell trust before they sell product, so a leader who grows the business in a way that spends that trust has failed even when the results look good for a while.
A supplements brand, a diagnostics chain, a fitness studio network, a personal care brand with functional claims, an ayurvedic or nutrition company: each is asking a customer to believe something about their own body on the brand's word. That belief is slow to build and quick to lose. The leaders who run these businesses have to carry the growth target and the credibility at the same time, and when the two pull against each other, which way they lean is a matter of character more than skill.
A capability screen will not show you which way a candidate leans. It will show you that they grew a category or ran a network of centres. It will not show you what they were prepared to say in an advertisement to do it, or how they handled a frontline that was cutting corners. Those are the questions this category turns on, and we ask them.
Which health and wellness leaders do we search for?
We search for the leaders who grow and protect a trust-led consumer brand: marketing and brand, growth, category and product, operations for clinics, centres and studios, customer experience, quality and regulatory, and the general management above them.
- Marketing and brand heads. Where the claim is the product, this is the most exposed role in the company. We read for people who can grow a brand without overpromising on its behalf.
- Growth leaders. Acquisition and retention in a category where a disappointed customer tells others, and where the rules on what can be said are stricter than in most consumer categories.
- Operations heads for clinics, centres and studios. Running people who deliver the service in person, to a standard, at scale, in many locations at once.
- Customer experience heads. In a trust-led brand, the complaint queue is where credibility is won back or lost for good.
- Quality and regulatory leaders. The people who hold the line when a launch date is pressing against a claim that is not yet defensible.
Why does culture matter more in trust-led categories?
In a trust-led category culture is the set of habits that decide what a company will and will not do to hit a number, and a leader who does not share those habits will erode the brand faster than any competitor could.
A hypothetical. A growth head joins a nutrition brand from a consumer category where aggressive claims were normal and rarely challenged. He is capable and brings results quickly. He also brings a tolerance for stretching what a product can be said to do, and a brand that had spent years earning a careful reputation finds itself defending advertisements it would never have run. Nobody at interview asked how he thought about claims. It did not seem like a capability question. It was the whole job.
Another. A clinic chain hires an operations head from quick service restaurants, impressed by his discipline with process and standards. The discipline is real and useful. What he has never had to do is run a frontline whose customer is anxious and in some discomfort, and whose trust depends on being treated as a patient rather than as a transaction. Some operators from outside the category make that shift easily. Others never do. The stage brief and the fit conversation are where we find out which, before the hire rather than after.
What changes when the product is delivered by a person?
In consumer-facing services the brand is delivered by the frontline, so the leader's real job is to make many people deliver trust consistently, and that is a different skill from running a product business.
A trainer, a therapist, a clinician, a stylist, a counsellor: each one is the brand for the time a customer is with them. A leader in a services business manages the people who deliver that moment, across locations, with turnover and training and the pressure to fill the calendar. Leaders who have only run product businesses often underestimate this. Leaders who have run people-delivered businesses recognise it immediately, and talk about their frontline differently. We listen for that.
How does compatibility with the founder show up in wellness brands?
Founders of health and wellness brands are often practitioners or people with a personal reason for starting the company, so their credibility is the brand's, and a leader joining has to be someone the founder can trust with it.
This is where most hires in the category are quietly won or lost. The founder says they want to step back from the brand. In the leader brief it becomes clear that they will always want to approve anything the brand says about efficacy, that they read every negative review, and that the last head of marketing left after pushing a campaign the founder found embarrassing. None of that is in the job description. All of it decides whether the next hire lasts. We put it in the brief, we tell candidates, and we read each one for whether they will be energised by working closely with a founder who cares this much, or worn down by it. Fit runs both ways: the founder also does their best work with the right person beside them.
How does The Corelation run a health and wellness search?
We brief the hiring manager before we brief the market.
Before any sourcing we sit with the person the hire will report to and write the leader brief. We write a stage brief that says what exists and what does not, and where the regulatory and reputational lines are. We assess capability with a senior operator from our network who has held the role, including people who have run regulated consumer businesses, and then we set capability aside. Candidates are read against the leader and the stage and hear the honest version of the brand. The one you hire comes with a handover note and a 90-day check-in. The method, step by step, is on how we work, from the leader brief to the 90-day check-in.
Health and wellness sits within our first-hand depth in consumer businesses, next to FMCG and consumer goods and retail and e-commerce. The full range of mandates is on who we work with.