A Head of Underwriting hired several years ago might have been brought in primarily to manage volume and people. The next person could need more experience of credit policy, automation or entering a different lending area. A sales leader who was successful through one distribution model may not necessarily have the relationships required for where the firm wants to grow next. Operations roles are becoming broader in businesses that have acquired other firms or accumulated several systems and now need somebody capable of making the whole thing work more efficiently.

None of that means the previous person was wrong for the role. They may have been exactly right for the business at the time. It simply means that hiring after a period of change should probably start with the business plan rather than the old job description.

This is where clients sometimes need more help than they initially expect. A brief can sound perfectly sensible until you start looking at the people who might actually do it. The combination of sector experience, management capability, technical knowledge, commerciality and salary that looked reasonable on paper may turn out to exist in a very small number of people.

We increasingly try to deal with that early. Sharing benchmark CVs and discussing the market before a search gets too far can save an enormous amount of time. A client might discover that the person they imagined is considerably more senior and expensive than expected, or that somebody from an adjacent part of the market could bring skills they had not originally considered. Sometimes the conversation also exposes that several different problems have been put into one job description.

That last point is particularly relevant at Head of level because these roles can become very broad. Leaner businesses naturally want people who can cover more ground, but there is a point at which asking somebody to be technically excellent, commercially minded, a strong people manager, transformational, well connected and capable of doing much of the work themselves produces a brief that very few people can realistically satisfy.

The temptation in a difficult hiring market is to wait for that person anyway.

Sometimes patience is absolutely the right answer. For a genuinely critical requirement, compromising too far simply creates another problem later. There is, however, a difference between being selective and spending six months waiting for somebody who probably doesn't exist. Knowing which parts of the brief are essential and which can be developed becomes much more important.

The other challenge at this level is persuading good people to move.

Candidate behaviour has changed considerably since COVID and job hugging is real. Someone who is already a successful Head of Credit or Head of Underwriting will usually have a reasonable salary, established relationships internally and a degree of security. They may also have flexibility around how they work and a possible route towards a board position. Moving to another lender to do essentially the same job carries risk without necessarily offering much in return.

This is one reason salary alone doesn't always solve a difficult search. The role itself needs to offer something. Greater responsibility, the opportunity to build a team or proposition, exposure to the board, equity, a clearer route to becoming a director or simply joining a business with an interesting growth story can all matter. Different candidates will value those things differently, which is why understanding what might actually make somebody move is part of the search rather than something to consider when an offer is made.

There is also an interesting succession point here. Today's Heads of function are, in many cases, tomorrow's board directors. If firms continually recruit people who are excellent at running their own area but give them little exposure to the wider commercial decisions of the business, the step to board level becomes considerably larger.

I think this matters particularly in credit. Technical ability is obviously essential for a senior credit appointment, but the people who eventually make successful Credit Directors need to understand the commercial consequences of their decisions as well. They need to know how funding, distribution, operations and shareholder expectations fit around credit, rather than seeing each transaction purely through a risk lens. The same principle applies in other functions. A Head of Sales who understands credit and profitability is more useful to the wider business, just as an Operations Director who understands the client and commercial implications of a process change will generally make better decisions.

For firms thinking about their next generation of leadership, this layer of management deserves quite a lot of attention. There may already be people internally who could take on more responsibility with the right exposure. In other cases, bringing somebody in from outside can add experience that does not currently exist and change the capability of the wider team.

We are also seeing circumstances where a contract or interim appointment makes sense. A firm may need somebody experienced to lead an integration, improve an underwriting function, sort out a technology problem or provide additional management capacity while it decides what the permanent structure should look like. Not every problem needs to begin with a permanent hire, particularly when the business itself is still changing.

What I find interesting about Head of function recruitment in specialist lending and asset finance is how much these appointments tell you about where a firm thinks it is going. They are rarely just replacements. Even when a vacancy starts because somebody has left, the process usually creates an opportunity to look again at the function, the skills within it and what will be expected of that team over the next few years.

After a difficult period for parts of the lending market, I suspect more firms will be having those conversations. Some will need greater underwriting capacity if volumes improve, others will want different distribution capability, and technology will continue to change what is expected from operations and credit teams. Consolidation will create its own requirements around integration and management.

The board will decide where the business is going, but much of whether it gets there will depend on the people immediately below it. For specialist lenders and asset finance firms, getting those appointments right is therefore considerably more important than the words “Head of” on an organisation chart might suggest.