2026-06-30 · Governance

AI-supported hiring can create false precision around the wrong question.

I have seen this in transformation mandates after initial stabilisation.

The programme is no longer burning every day: governance back in place, delivery more predictable, and the organisation regained enough confidence to ask a harder question:

Who should take this forward once the stabilisation work is done?

That is sometimes when I am asked to support the discussion around the permanent team. Not as a recruiter, but as someone who has seen the actual problems from inside.

And that is where formal hiring logic often becomes fragile.

With internal candidates, the discussion rarely starts with keywords. It starts with questions of trust, judgement and operating reality.

• Can this person get the organisation moving again?
• Will the sites trust her?
• Can he work with the works council without turning every issue into a symbolic battle?
• Does she understand when governance helps, and when it becomes theatre?
• Can this person hold the tension without turning every meeting into another programme review?

These are not soft questions. In transformation, they are the hard ones.

When the role is opened externally, this operating judgement is often translated into a job description: transformation leadership, stakeholder management, ERP/MES experience, IT/OT understanding, change capability, commercial awareness.

All reasonable. All familiar. All scorable. And still incomplete.

Because a transformation role is not appointed into a neutral environment. It is appointed into a specific operating reality: a workforce that has lost trust, a management team tired of another programme, sites with local histories, unresolved governance conflicts, consulting fatigue, weak interfaces and trade-offs that have survived several steering committees.

A job description rarely says that. It usually describes the organisation people wish they had, not the situation the next leader will inherit.