When I advise people starting out in this profession, I tell them the same thing every time: before you try to find a solution, you need to fully understand what the client actually needs.
I don’t say this because it sounds right. I say it because it is the part of the job that determines whether the assignment works.
It also means the job doesn’t start where most people assume it does. Not with a role, a title or a list of requirements. It starts with a question: does this organisation actually need what it thinks it needs?
Recruitment starts with a brief
A recruitment process usually starts with a defined role: a title, a set of responsibilities, a list of requirements. The task is to find the closest match.
Interim management often starts somewhere earlier than that. The brief exists, but the real question is whether the brief itself is describing the right problem.
Take three roles that get requested the same way: a plant manager, a finance lead, a transformation director. In practice, what’s often needed is something else: someone who can stabilize a function while a structural issue is resolved, someone who can build a capability that has never existed internally, someone who can hold a business together while a permanent decision is still being made.
Getting that wrong doesn’t just waste time. It places the wrong kind of leader in the assignment, with the wrong mandate, measured against the wrong outcome.
Why this looks like consulting, not staffing
Deep knowledge of the field matters. So does a strong network of candidates. But neither counts for much if the diagnosis underneath them is wrong.
That is closer to management consulting than to recruitment. A consultant doesn’t start by proposing an answer. They start by testing whether the question is the right one.
The same discipline applies here. A candidate’s CV, however strong, is not the starting point. The starting point is understanding the gap the organisation is actually facing, which is not always the gap it thinks it has.
Why this gets skipped
It gets skipped because diagnosis is slower than placement, and most organisations are under pressure to move fast. A vacancy feels urgent. A missing capability, described precisely, often looks less urgent on paper, even when it is the more serious problem.
There is also a natural incentive to reach for the familiar. It is easier for a business to ask for a role it already understands than to articulate a problem it hasn’t yet fully defined. That is understandable. It is also, frequently, the moment where the wrong solution gets built on the right intention.
What this means for the organisation
If your organisation is considering interim leadership, the first useful question is not “how quickly can you find someone.” It is “help us understand what we’re actually solving for.”
That conversation takes longer at the start. It saves considerably more time later, because the person who eventually takes on the assignment is working against the right problem, not the one that was easiest to describe in a job spec.
Speed still matters. Interim leadership exists precisely because organisations cannot always wait for a permanent hire while a gap sits open. But speed applied to the wrong diagnosis doesn’t solve the problem faster. It just gets the wrong solution in place sooner.
The job that gets discussed the least
The recruitment side of interim management is visible: the search, the shortlist, the placement. The diagnosis that happens before any of that is far less visible, and it is the part that actually decides whether the assignment succeeds.
That is the part of the job that matters most. Whether it’s the first time an organisation hires an interim manager, or the tenth.