Moving into our twenty-third year of trading, a look back at the past twelve months of searches, trends and people that shaped it.
This week marks the start of our 23rd year of trading, and as ever, it’s a moment we take to look back before we look forward. What follows is a summary of the year just gone: the hires we’ve delivered, the trends we’ve tracked, what the wider market data tells us, and what we’re hearing from clients and candidates alike.
It has been a year of senior, high trust mandates across a genuinely diverse client base, spanning insurance, healthcare and veterinary care, hospitality, retail, technology, defence and financial services. What has connected these mandates is the calibre of ownership behind them: private equity backed businesses moving at pace after investment, ambitious founder led companies professionalising their leadership as they scale, large, listed enterprises reinforcing their people function at the top table, and privately owned and family businesses bringing in external leadership to strengthen theirs. Across all four, the brief has been the same: senior HR leadership who can play a broader role across the executive team, not just within their own subject matter space, matching that ambition.
The roles themselves reflect the calibre of these mandates, with multiple CPO appointments, People Directors, Talent Directors, Global Director of Operations, and Heads of Function across L&D, Talent and HRBP cohorts. Generalist hires led the way this year, with specialist appointments, including talent acquisition and reward, in the minority by comparison. We work across both, and this year’s demand simply skewed towards broad, commercially fluent HR leadership, particularly among private equity backed businesses.
It has continued to be a client driven market this year, with clients arriving with real clarity about the calibre of leader they need. That suits how we’ve always worked: as specialists in senior search, we invest real time in understanding each brief, the business behind it, and the calibre of leadership it calls for, bringing rigour and genuine market insight to every mandate, whatever sits behind the business.
Private equity backed businesses have taken centre stage for us, with demand for strong, commercially minded people leadership across PE portfolios one of the defining features of our year. Bain & Company’s 2026 Global Private Equity Report puts real numbers behind that pace, noting that PE owners typically replace between 50 and 70 per cent of portfolio company CEOs during the hold period, and naming investment in talent, alongside AI, as one of the clearest levers winning firms are pulling on.
Founder led businesses told a similar story of ambition. Bain’s own Founder’s Mentality research has long found that founder led companies outperform their peers, by as much as 2.1 times on total shareholder return between 2015 and 2023, and the founders we worked with this year were investing in senior HR leadership precisely to protect that edge as they professionalise and scale.
Listed businesses brought a different pressure. PwC’s Governance Insights Center found CEO turnover remained elevated through 2025, with a record number of departures driven by activist investor pressure, pushing boards to sharpen succession planning across the top team, HR leadership included. And among the privately owned and family businesses we work with, KPMG’s 2026 Global Family Business Report found that only 36 per cent now expect family members to hold most senior leadership roles within a decade, with attracting strong external talent ranked their top workforce challenge, exactly the gap search like ours exists to close.
Sources: Bain & Company 2026 Global Private Equity Report; Bain & Company Founder’s Mentality research; PwC Governance Insights Center; KPMG 2026 Global Family Business Report.
It has also been a harder market to forecast, but a steadier one to work in. After thirty years in this business, that’s not something said lightly. Forecasting has genuinely become trickier, yet the market itself has felt more consistent this year, with fewer of the sharp highs and lows of previous cycles and a steadier rhythm of activity throughout. And AI has been on every agenda, coming up in virtually every client briefing this year, not as a niche HR topic but as a business wide question. Clients want to talk about how AI has been tested across their organisation, what pilots have shown, and how ready both leadership and the wider workforce are to work with it. Increasingly, the brief isn’t just about using AI to sharpen performance today, it’s about how it feeds into strategic workforce planning, organisational redesign, and a clearer read on the skills landscape ahead.
Our own experience this year is echoed in the data on senior HR hiring specifically, and in the wider commentary shaping the profession our candidates lead.
Senior HR hiring has bucked the wider jobs market this year. KPMG’s UK Report on Jobs recorded permanent placements in continuous decline for 45 months before stabilising over the summer, one of the longest and most sustained downturns in the survey’s history. Against that, Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report, drawn from close to 12,000 C-suite executives, HR leaders, investors and employees worldwide, found that 98 per cent of executives are planning organisational design changes over the next two years. That kind of restructuring doesn’t happen without strong people leadership in place to run it, which chimes with the calibre and pace of the mandates we’ve been briefed on this year.
Candidate experience has always been one of our strongest differentiators, and the feedback we receive bears that out consistently: candidates tell us, time and again, how much they value the way we communicate and stay engaged with them throughout a process. That mattered more than ever this year. Many senior candidates have told us they’ve faced silence and ghosting elsewhere in the market, and even where they weren’t the successful hire with us, they’ve valued being kept informed throughout, real proof that our approach to candidate care sets us apart.
Ghosting has become a defining frustration of this hiring cycle, with candidates left waiting far more often than before, largely attributed to AI driven application volumes overwhelming hiring processes.
This echoes what senior candidates tell us directly, and reinforces why consistent, honest communication is something we’re known for rather than a nice to have.
The wider direction of the HR profession points the same way on a different front. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report, based on a survey of more than 9,000 business and HR leaders across 89 countries, found that 66 per cent of C-suite leaders believe traditional functions must fundamentally change to remain competitive, yet only 7 per cent report meaningful progress towards that goal, exactly the kind of gap that puts a premium on strong HR leadership. Gartner’s 2026 CHRO Leadership Perspective Survey puts AI transformation, workforce redesign and leader development at the top of the profession’s agenda. FTI Consulting’s 2026 Private Equity AI Radar found that while most AI initiatives are meeting or exceeding their business case, only around a third of portfolio companies are using AI day to day, a gap we hear echoed in our own PE backed briefings. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer adds that distinctly human skills, judgement, creativity and leadership, are becoming more prized as AI adoption spreads, and that companies most able to use AI effectively are growing headcount faster than their peers.
Sources: Mercer Global Talent Trends 2026; KPMG UK Report on Jobs; Criteria (via Fortune); Deloitte 2026 Global Human Capital Trends; Gartner 2026 CHRO Leadership Perspective Survey; FTI Consulting 2026 Private Equity AI Radar; PwC 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer.
Search processes take time, and one thing we keep coming back to with candidates between roles is how to use it well. Three conversations have come up more than any others this year.
The first is AI literacy. We’ve been pointing people towards substantive executive education rather than a quick certificate, programmes like Oxford Saïd’s AI-Driven Business Transformation Executive Programme or Cambridge Judge’s AI Leadership Programme, both built for senior, non-technical leaders who need to be conversant in AI strategy and governance, not the underlying technology itself. A credential from a trusted name carries real weight at interview, and signals a leader shaping how AI affects the whole business, not just their own function, rather than catching up to it.
The second is the boardroom. More senior HR leaders are exploring a first non-executive appointment alongside their search, both to broaden experience and build a portfolio for later in their career. NED search isn’t our market, so rather than guess at it, we point people towards specialist NED advisers whose advice on building a genuine board CV and approaching that first appointment properly is the best we’ve come across.
The third is fractional and portfolio work. HR Magazine reported this year that fractional chief people officers are no longer a stopgap but a genuine model, giving scaling and PE backed businesses senior HR leadership without a full time cost, and giving experienced CPOs a way to flex across two or three organisations at once. We placed two ourselves this year: one to lead a digital transformation and organisational restructure, and one to support a CEO and board through their first year in post. Neither client’s budget would have secured the skills they needed full time, so we proposed a more experienced hire part time, within the same total spend. It shifted their thinking.
It’s part of a wider challenge to how senior leadership gets structured. Alix Ainsley and Charlotte Cherry, who job shared senior HR leadership roles for over a decade, including at Quilter and Virgin, and founded the consultancy Daring Two, have trailblazed this thinking for years: splitting a senior role to combine skills, balance budget against capability, and cut the job differently rather than assuming it has to be one person, full time, indefinitely. Whether fractional or shared, the principle is the same: what a business needs right now, in terms of profile and capability, isn’t necessarily what it will need in twelve to eighteen months, particularly in scaling businesses, and the sharpest clients are structuring hires around that horizon rather than defaulting to one person, for longevity.
Sources: Saïd Business School, University of Oxford; Cambridge Judge Business School; HR Magazine; Daring Two.
Twenty three years in, the constant has always been the people, and that starts with each other. We’ve worked together for 27 years, the last 23 of them building Vana, and that partnership, two people who know each other’s judgement inside out, still sits behind every search we run. There’s a particular privilege in recruiting into the senior HR world, working with people who understand people, and that, combined with the sheer diversity of sectors we work across, is what keeps the work as engaging now as it was in year one.
We can’t place everyone we meet, but we make time for everyone who comes through our process, and they leave with honest feedback, considered advice and real engagement along the way, successful hire or not. Kindness, communication, engagement and genuine humanity remain what Vana is built on.
None of that happens in isolation. We work alongside a number of trusted associate partners, executive coaches and leadership development organisations, and we believe firmly in the power of referrals, connecting people and businesses to each other, not just to us, because it’s good for everyone when it happens.
If you’re planning senior HR hires this year, or know someone who is, we’d love to be part of the conversation.
So much of our best work comes through referral and repeat relationships, and we never take that for granted. Whether it’s a first conversation about a brief that’s still taking shape, or simply people we should know, please do keep us in mind.
It’s how Vana has grown for 23 years, and it’s how we’ll keep growing.
With thanks, as ever, for another year spent working with brilliant people, on both sides of the table.
Debbie Flowers & Jo White
Co-Founders, Vana HR Resourcing
