The Brief Is the Search
A VP search cannot succeed against a brief that the market cannot fulfill. This seems obvious. But according to our analysis of recovery searches and inherited shortlists, over 30% of executive searches arrive at Majhi Group with briefs that contain fundamental contradictions — requirements that cannot all be satisfied simultaneously in any real candidate.
The intake conversation is the single highest-leverage moment in any search. Getting the brief right before sourcing begins saves weeks of effort and prevents the pattern of repeated shortlist rejections that ends careers and relationships.
Brief Failure Patterns
The Over-Specified Brief
An over-specified brief typically combines requirements from several different people's wish lists: the CEO wants a strategic thinker, the board wants a proven closer, the current team wants someone who will support them, and HR has added required years of experience and specific industry backgrounds. The resulting brief describes a person who doesn't exist — or exists so rarely that the search will take 12+ months to fill.
The Primary Filter Test
A workable brief has one primary filter — the single most important thing the candidate must have. Everything else is secondary. When a brief has five equally weighted primary requirements, it is not a brief — it is a committee document. We rebuild it around what the business actually needs to move forward in the next 18 months.
The Stage Mismatch Brief
Stage mismatch in a brief is more subtle. A CEO building a $3M ARR company writes a VP Sales brief based on what they've read about great VP Sales leaders — and those reference points are often from $20-50M ARR companies. The result is a profile that systematically excludes the candidates who would actually thrive in the role.
The VP Sales who scaled a team from 3 to 30 at $5-30M ARR is a different person from the VP Sales who managed a 100-person org at $100M ARR. The brief needs to match the stage, not the aspiration. See: When the VP Sales Profile Is Set for the Wrong Stage.
The Compensation Mismatch Brief
Compensation mismatches are usually discovered late — at the offer stage — which is the worst possible moment. The fix is to validate the comp range against the market before sourcing begins, not after a finalist has invested weeks in the process. According to Executive Compensation Report 2026, VP Sales OTE at Series B averages $220-290K. A brief that targets this profile at $160K OTE will consistently produce either unqualified candidates or candidates who are using the process to get a market offer from their current employer.
The Intake Conversation That Prevents All of This
Before writing a brief, we ask the CEO three questions that surface most of these problems: (1) What is the business problem this person is solving? (2) What does success look like in 12 months? (3) What's the one thing this person must have that you wouldn't hire without? The answers to these questions usually produce a brief that is half the length and twice as fillable as the one the CEO arrived with.
See: Executive Search Readiness Assessment | Why Startup Executive Searches Fail
"41 days. A $275K search. Two firms failed in 60+ days. That's not luck -- that's a different system."
-- Majhi Group placement record. Read the full process anatomy