As next year’s plans are being written, I keep coming back to the same thought: much of the senior hiring is still being done for a version of the world that has already moved on.

Businesses are operating through change on almost every front. Markets move quickly. Teams are being reorganised. Digital expectations keep shifting. The shape of leadership is moving with all of that. And yet plenty of briefs still ask for somebody who has already done the exact same role in the exact same sector under roughly the exact same conditions.

I understand the instinct. In periods like this, familiarity can feel like risk control.

Sometimes it is. Often, it is just a habit. The safest-looking candidate on paper can be the person best matched to the past, not the future. In a changing market, a business may be better served by someone with adjacent experience, wider range or a very different lens on the problem. Those are often the people who get filtered out early because they do not fit the category, neatly enough.

That is one reason the diversity conversation so often disappoints me. Widening a shortlist matters. But if the organisation still rewards one style of communication, one type of background and one narrow version of leadership, difference gets translated back into sameness very quickly.

At that point, the issue is not access. It is culture.

Underused talent is not only a sourcing problem. It is an organisational one. You can find people from broader backgrounds, different sectors and less familiar routes into leadership. The harder question is whether the business is actually ready to make good use of what they bring.

A role description should be an honest view of where the business is heading, not a memorial to the last person who held the job.

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