By Doug Bates, co-founder of Intelligent People
Something has changed in the way companies think about hiring senior product and marketing leaders and from what we’re seeing at Intelligent People, I don’t think it’s going back.
For a long time, the route was fairly predictable. A company would raise a significant round of funding, decide it was time to bring in a Head of Product, CPO or CMO, run a search and make a permanent appointment. That was the standard playbook.
We saw it time and again. A business had reached a certain stage, needed more senior leadership and the answer was to hire that experience into the business on a full-time basis.
But the market has changed.
As funding became harder to secure and businesses became much more focused on extending their runway, senior hiring slowed. Again, that’s not particularly surprising.
What’s more interesting is what happened to the question companies were asking.
Instead of asking, “Who should we hire as our Head of Product?”, we’re increasingly hearing something closer to: “What do we actually need a product leader to achieve over the next six to nine months, and what’s the best way of getting that experience into the business?”
That’s a very different question.
And it opens up a very different set of options: an interim leader, a fractional CPO or CMO, a consultant brought in to solve a specific problem, or a permanent hire with a much more tightly defined brief.
The rise in conversations around fractional leadership is probably the clearest example of this shift.
A few years ago, a fractional CPO would have been relatively unusual. Now, it’s a much more normal part of the conversation – particularly for businesses between funding rounds that need experienced leadership, but aren’t yet ready to commit to the cost of a permanent executive.
And we’re seeing that change directly in our own enquiries, with fractional and interim requirements up by more than 92% over the last three years.
For me, this isn’t just a temporary response to a tougher funding environment. It reflects a broader change in how companies are thinking about senior leadership, less about filling a particular job title, and more about getting the right experience and capability into the business at the point it’s actually needed.
The candidate side has changed too
There’s a second half to this that often gets missed. As companies became more careful, more quality candidates came onto the market, or at least became open to a move. When strong candidates and careful employers meet, you don’t get less hiring. You get more considered hiring, where companies can afford to hold out for the right person, and increasingly they do.
It also challenges an old assumption, that the best leaders are never available and always have to be prised out of a job. Right now, the strongest person for a role is more often open to a conversation than people expect.
What this means if you’re hiring
- Start with the need, not the job title. Before you default to a permanent full-time hire, work out what you need product or marketing leadership to achieve in the next few quarters.
- Make the most of the candidate market while it’s in your favour. Being able to wait for the right person is a luxury a tighter market takes away, so define what ‘right’ looks like and hold to it.
- Don’t read caution as a lack of demand. The companies that paused still need leadership. That demand hasn’t gone, it’s just coming back in a more flexible shape.
Where I think this goes
Permanent, full-time hiring isn’t going anywhere, and for a lot of roles it’s still the right answer. What’s changed is that it’s no longer the automatic one. Once a company has used a fractional CPO and seen it work, or run a tight interim brief and got what it needed, those options stay on the table for next time.
The companies that hire best from here are the ones that treat “permanent, interim or fractional?” as a real question, asked fresh each time, rather than a decision already made before the conversation starts. If you’re weighing up a senior hire and want a sounding board on which route fits, that’s a conversation we have with founders most weeks so book a meeting in my diary to discuss further.
