After placing senior talent in print businesses for over a decade, the pattern of avoidable recruitment failure is depressingly consistent. The same mistakes appear across businesses of very different sizes, ownership structures and commercial models. Here are the five we see most often — and what to do instead.
1. Writing a Job Description for the Person Who Just Left
The most common mistake is defining the role around the last incumbent rather than the business’s current and future needs. If your previous Sales Director was a seasoned account manager who kept existing revenue stable, but your growth ambition now requires someone who can hunt new business, those are very different profiles. Writing a brief that describes the former will attract the wrong candidates — and screen out exactly the people you need.
Before briefing any recruitment partner, invest time in defining what success looks like 12 months into the role. Work backwards from that to define the candidate profile. It’s a discipline most businesses skip, and it costs them significantly in wasted time and poor hires.
2. Making the Process Too Long
The best senior candidates in print are employed. They’re not sitting at home refreshing their inbox — they’re running P&Ls, managing teams and fielding multiple approaches. A process that drags on for 10-12 weeks across four or five stages will lose them. Not because they’ve accepted a competing offer (though that happens), but because they’ve concluded that the business is indecisive, bureaucratic, or hasn’t genuinely committed to the hire.
Three stages — structured first interview, second with key stakeholders, and a final offer conversation — is almost always sufficient for a senior role. Add stages only when they add genuine information, not to tick governance boxes.
3. Leading with Compensation Too Early
Salary matters — we’re not pretending otherwise. But leading an initial conversation with a rigid compensation figure, particularly if it’s at the lower end of market, closes conversations before they’ve started. The best candidates are motivated by what they can build, the quality of the team, the investment behind the business, and the genuine career development on offer. Money follows from the rest of the conversation — it doesn’t lead it.
4. Hiring for Technical Knowledge Instead of Commercial Capability
Print businesses often prioritise deep technical knowledge over commercial acumen, particularly for senior roles. This makes intuitive sense — you want someone who understands the process. But at Sales Director or MD level, technical knowledge without the ability to translate it into commercial value, client relationships and P&L growth is a significant limitation. The best senior hires understand the technology well enough to be credible, but their real value is commercial.
5. Failing to Sell the Opportunity
Senior candidates evaluate businesses as carefully as businesses evaluate candidates. Your investment narrative, your growth ambition, the quality of the leadership team, the culture of the business — these things matter, and they need to be communicated actively, not assumed. Businesses that treat the interview process as purely evaluative — we’re deciding about you, not you about us — consistently lose candidates to businesses that invest in the same candidates.
If you’d like to talk through a senior appointment in print, we’re happy to provide a confidential market view before you go to brief.
