Executive Search Trends for 2026: Adapting to Change

Now firmly in the rear-view mirror, 2025 saw executive search shaped by continuous transition. Business leaders spent the year recalibrating their response to a disruptive, fast-changing world, adapting themselves and their organisations with greater intentionality, often in the seeming absence of credible, coordinated action from political leadership at home and abroad.

A common thread ran through almost every executive and boardroom conversation I had. Leaders stopped waiting for the macro environment to settle and instead chose to act within uncertainty. Uncertainty is no longer the exception; it is the new operating model. The most effective leaders are no longer trying to navigate around it, instead leading decisively through it.

That shift cascaded from the C-suite into senior leadership teams, management layers and divisional leadership. The strongest broadened not just their remit, but their sense of responsibility. “Ask not what your business can do for you, but what you can do for your business”.

The result was a year of two halves. The first reflected the flat economic appetite of our national leadership. The second, however, revealed the cumulative impact of this new intentionality. We finished with our strongest H2 on record, with August becoming our busiest month for new instructions, the first time that has happened since I began work in 1993.

Almost every search we undertook in 2025 reflected this evolution. Appointees were no longer viewed simply as stewards of team performance, but as value creators; leaders shaping strategy, influencing culture and helping define the broader societal realities in which their organisations operate.

A decade of successive economic shocks has sharpened leadership instincts. Today’s most effective executives lean into disruption rather than retreat from it. Agility is no longer a differentiator; it is a prerequisite.

And so, as 2025 forced the acceptance of permanent uncertainty, 2026 is already shaping up as the year organisations act with conviction inside that reality. The differentiator will be relationships, CEO to Chair, executive to SLT, peer to peer, and the quality of 360-degree dialogue that underpins sound judgement.

It will also be the year in which the best continue to grow: professionally, personally and as leaders.

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Other notable trends

The flight to experience
Uncertainty accelerated the move towards experience. The average age of our placements held broadly steady at 47, yet only two top-table appointees were under 52, while our oldest was months rather than years from their 65th birthday.

The average age of first-time directors rose by four years. Across North-West businesses we benchmarked, de-risking was evident in CEOs increasingly being appointed internally from CFO roles. First-time NED appointments fell to a third of their 2022 level, with the average age now exceeding 60. Every newly appointed Chair bar two had previously been a CEO. Even where external benchmarking was undertaken, boards consistently favoured known quantities.

Succession planning
A natural progression from the above. Boards increasingly recognised succession as a primary responsibility rather than a deferred aspiration. Every search we undertook included a clear long-term development pathway for the role. More significantly, we saw growing investment in building leadership pipelines, particularly through widening P&L exposure to satisfy the market’s demand for commercially credible executives in tomorrow’s SLTs and C-suites.

Diversity
Progress continued, but organically rather than by stipulation. Female appointments reached 48% (down from 54% in 2024), while candidates identifying as from non-British heritage backgrounds increased from 24% to 37%.

Remuneration, equity and wealth creation
Uncertainty and intensified competition for top performers drove a short-term increase in higher base salaries to around 70% of offers; though this may prove fleeting given the growing disincentives around PAYE earnings. More enduring has been the rise of equity participation, LTIPs and structured wealth-creation vehicles as core components of senior packages, particularly where tax-efficient frameworks exist.

New markets
AI continued to feature prominently, often most enthusiastically in candidate covering emails. In practice, we completed two placements directly within data science and AI, and a further three at SLT level focused on assessing the operational and process efficiencies AI can genuinely deliver.

Search and rescue
Over a third of our searches in the past six months involved stepping in after traditional recruitment approaches had failed, rescuing processes that had drifted for between four and nine months. Our delivery rate in those cases has been 100%, with completion times between seven and twelve weeks.

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That final point underlines the widening divide between traditional recruitment and executive search. For years, Headhunting/Search has delivered superior outcomes by targeting and engaging leadership candidates who have no need to look for a role, rather than those actively seeking one. The more senior the hire and the greater the strategic importance, the more pronounced that advantage becomes.

The declining effectiveness of database-driven, advertising-led recruitment models in senior hiring has been evident for some time. Reducing staffing levels, falling revenues and repeated profit warnings across large staffing groups stand in sharp contrast to search firms achieving record revenues and earnings. (Click here to see an example of why Recruitment Advertising Doesn’t Work)

Forecasts from multinational staffing businesses for 2026 strike a cautious tone: stability over growth, rising automation, and cost pressure increasingly replacing human interface as the primary driver of hiring decisions.

Executive search firms paint a markedly different picture. Their outlook centres on heightened demand for adaptable leaders and the continued success of organisations that treat senior hiring as a strategic investment rather than a transactional necessity; embedding leadership decisions into organisational strategy rather than reacting under time pressure.

Sitting firmly within that latter camp, I share that assessment.

Traditional recruitment businesses that expanded rapidly in the post-pandemic surge are now operating in survival mode, often producing a deteriorating product driven by cost pressure and the race to be first, not best. In contrast, we see the advantage of avoiding noise and urgency, instead working with clients to make better decisions about people, culture, chemistry, structure and strategy, and how they truly connect.

Adaptation is now central to senior hiring, both in how organisations recruit and in the demonstrable ability of those they appoint. Tick-box recruitment belongs to a simpler era. In a world defined by accelerating complexity, the ability to adapt with intent will be one of the defining traits of successful leaders.

Appointees will increasingly be expected to show curiosity, courage, reflection and experimentation, alongside deep, multi-directional relationships and genuinely human-centred succession planning.

As Jack Welch famously observed:

“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”