Structure & Hiring · 01
The Structure Problem That Lands on HR
The pattern is consistent. Leadership sets a growth target. The brief lands on People without a structure review. HR is asked to hire into roles that aren’t designed to deliver what the business needs.
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The fix is unsexy but measurable. Audit the function before you open the role. Does every team and senior seat have a clear remit, the right reporting line, and authority that matches accountability? Most don’t. That’s why senior hires fail and replacement cost lands back on People inside 18 months.
Then it becomes a calibration question. Most People functions get handed a brief and a hiring panel that hasn’t aligned on what success looks like. Three interviewers test three different things, the strongest signal gets diluted, and the appointment is made on chemistry. We push hiring panels to a written scorecard before any candidate enters the room. It is the single highest-leverage thing People can install. It also gives you a defensible record when the role doesn’t work out and the post-mortem starts.
Two questions to ask before signing off any senior brief from the business.
— Is the structure designed for where we’re going, or inherited from where we’ve been?
— Has the hiring panel been calibrated on what good actually looks like?
Fix that first. Everything else is hiring.
Hiring & Calibration · 02
Hiring for Desirability, Not Volume
Our advisory has always been the same. Brand-specific creative leadership outperforms imitation hires every time. But in most People functions, the brief gets framed around volume, headcount and budget — not whether the senior hire can actually move the brand.
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Alexander McQueen is the cautionary proof. 60% revenue decline. Half its stores closing. 200 redundancies that landed on the People desk. The post-mortem will not be about headcount or talent supply. It will be that the creative leadership hires were filtered for fit and CV, not for the singular point of view the brand needed. The structure was never reset before the hires were signed off.
The industry is finally catching up. Kering’s Luca de Meo said it plainly. The goal is to design products people desire, not feed a calendar. That has direct consequences for the People function. The hires you sign off need to be built for that brief.
What this means for how you assess senior creatives. The standard interview loop tests fit, communication and process. It rarely tests point of view. We push our clients to add a creative scorecard — three questions about taste, three about tension, three about what they would kill on day one. Run it the same way every time. Calibrate the panel against it. Then you have a defensible signal when the appointment is made, and a clean reason on file when the role does not work out the back of it.
Desirability is the new sell-through.
Role Design · 03
Creating Roles That Don’t Exist Yet
When Haus Labs by Lady Gaga approached us, the brief wasn’t to fill a role. It was to design one. The CEO had identified a gap that didn’t map to any existing job spec on the People function. No template, no benchmark salary, no internal precedent.
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Our view. Most People functions are organised around replacing leavers and back-filling org charts. The highest-leverage hires don’t sit in either category. They are roles the business doesn’t yet know it needs. Spotting them is a strategic skill that has to sit with the CHRO, not the talent team.
The reference points. Nicola Formichetti, the fashion veteran who took creative risk to turn around Mugler. Demna at Balenciaga. None of them were hired into existing roles. The People functions that backed those hires built the seat first — remit, reporting line, sign-off authority — then ran a search calibrated against it.
The Haus Labs outcome. 10% DTC growth in 15 months. The #1 bestselling foundation at Sephora. 10B+ TikTok views. Allure Best of Beauty. Expansion into 12 European markets.
The question for your function. Where are you back-filling roles that should be redesigned? Most People teams under-invest here because the brief never comes from the business — it has to come from you.
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