The VP of HR You Think You're Hiring Isn't the One You'll Get
Every CHRO has sat through this cycle: a VP of HR role opens up, the job description gets built collaboratively, and somewhere between the first stakeholder meeting and final sign-off, the brief quietly turns into a wish list. Transformation experience. Commercial credibility. M&A exposure. Deep reward knowledge. International scope. A future CHRO in waiting.
Nobody added anything unreasonable. That's the problem. Each addition made sense in isolation. Together, they describe someone who may not exist — and if they do, they're not available, and if they are available, they're unlikely to move for another VP title.
Here's the harder truth: even when that unicorn candidate is found, the CHRO who hired them often doesn't get what they actually needed.
You’re Not Hiring a Title. You’re Hiring a Gap
The most useful question isn't "what should this person have on their CV?" It's "what should stop landing on my desk once they're in the seat?"
That's a completely different exercise. It forces specificity. Maybe it's the day-to-day leadership of Regional HR Directors who currently escalate everything upward. Maybe it's pulling Talent, Reward and HR Operations together whenever a cross-functional issue surfaces — something only you currently have the authority to force through. Maybe it's simply having someone who can turn your strategic direction into something the HR leadership team can actually execute, instead of watching that translation happen inconsistently across the function.
If you can't answer that question specifically, the search can't either. You'll end up interviewing people against a job description instead of against a gap, and you'll struggle to explain - to your own stakeholders as much as to candidates - why one strong person is a better fit than another equally strong person.
Breadth is the Job. Depth Everywhere is Not.
There's a trap CHROs fall into when writing a VP of HR brief: treating the role as though it needs to out-expert every specialist within the function. It doesn't, and design it that way at your own cost.
If you've got a strong Head of Total Rewards in the team, you want that person to know more about reward than your VP HR does. The HR leader’s value isn't matching that depth - it's knowing enough to ask the question the Reward expert hasn't been asked yet, or spotting when a "talent problem" is actually an organisation design problem, and getting HRBPs, HR Ops and CofE functions moving toward one outcome when each has a legitimate, competing priority.
That's a leadership and integration skill, not a technical one. It's also much harder to see on a Resume, which is exactly why so many HR VP briefs default to listing technical requirements instead — they're easier to screen for, even though they're not what determines whether the hire succeeds.
A sharper way to sort the brief: what does this person need to know personally, what do they need to be able to lead without owning the detail, and what can they reasonably learn on the job? Collapsing all three into "must have" is how a VP search turns into a CHRO search with a smaller salary attached.
The Title Tells You Almost Nothing About What You Actually Need to Know
This matters even more once you move past hiring and into succession planning - because the same collapsing happens there, quietly, over years.
There's an assumption running through a lot of succession conversations: if someone has reached VP of HR, they must be close to CHRO-ready. The title becomes a proxy for readiness, but it shouldn't be – and treating it that way is how businesses end up with a successor who looks right on the org chart and struggles the moment the seat is actually theirs.
Title is assigned by the business. Readiness is built by the role. A VP title reflects where a company decided to draw its organisational lines - nothing more. One business hands out VP titles at the point someone leads three direct reports and a regional budget. Another reserves VP for the one person standing directly beneath the CHRO with genuine enterprise-wide accountability. Neither company is wrong. But it means two people with identical titles can have had entirely different jobs, and neither title tells you which is which.
So, when a VP of HR is positioned internally as "the obvious next CHRO," the title is doing work it was never built to do. It's answering a structural question (where does this person sit) when the question that actually matters is experiential: what has this person been trusted to decide, alone, without someone more senior catching it if they got it wrong?
Being a strong VP of HR and being ready to be the most senior HR voice in the business are different jobs with different failure points. A VP can be excellent, genuinely impressive, at running a function, leading directors, executing a strategy someone else shaped, and still have no track record of doing the things that actually define the CHRO seat inclusive of:
Holding the primary HR relationship with the CEO and board, not attending those conversations as backup
Setting people strategy from a blank page, rather than translating someone else's strategy into execution
Being the final point of accountability when there's no CHRO above them to escalate to
Making resourcing and prioritisation trade-offs across the whole function, not just defending their own patch of it
A VP who has spent years as a highly capable number two can be brilliant at all of the first list and have genuinely never been tested on the second. That's not a character flaw or a skills gap you can assume closes with time. It is simply untested territory. And the worst time to discover someone can't operate in it is after they've already been given the seat.
The same collapsing happens with capability more broadly, not just readiness. A VP title gets read as shorthand for "senior enough to know reward, talent, ER, OD and HRIS at a strategic level" - when in reality, most VPs built their credibility in one or two of those areas and have been leading, not personally practising, the rest for years. That's not a weakness; leading a function you don't personally have deep technical mastery of is a large part of what the VP job actually is. But it means the title alone can't tell you whether someone has real breadth or has simply been positioned across a broad remit without ever being pressure-tested across all of it.
The more revealing questions sit underneath the title entirely: when something genuinely difficult landed, be it a restructure, a crisis, a board-level people issue; were they the one who owned the outcome, or the one who briefed the person who did? Have they been trusted to lead people who are senior in their own right, or has their team mostly been more junior than them? When their function's priorities collided with another function's, did they hold their ground and find a resolution, or did that get settled a level up? Has their remit actually grown because people trusted them with more, or did the title change without the job underneath it changing much at all?
The Room Full of Successors
Nowhere does this play out more visibly than inside a large, matrixed corporation. Walk into the HR leadership team of most sizeable multinationals and you'll find something the org chart doesn't quite capture: five, eight, sometimes dozens of HR VPs, spread across regions, business units and specialist HR functions — and a meaningful number of them quietly operating on the assumption that they're a plausible next CHRO.
It's an understandable assumption. They're senior. They're in the room for big decisions. They report into a CHRO or close to one. The title on their signature block is one step from the top of the HR function. From where they're sitting, the math looks straightforward.
It rarely is, and the reason isn't a knock on any of them individually — it's that "VP of HR" in a large corporation isn't one job. It's a title stretched across a wide range of genuinely different remits, and only some of those remits build what the CHRO seat actually requires.
A Regional VP HR for EMEA is managing a multi-country remit and translating a global strategy into something that works across wildly different markets and stakeholders. A VP of Total Rewards is running deep technical strategy across a specific discipline, with real influence but a narrow lane. A VP of HR for a specific business unit might be closer to a generalist Director role but carries a bigger title simply because of where the business decided to draw its structure. All three report at a similar level. All three might sit on the same HR leadership team. None of them have had the same job. And in a large company, where titles get distributed partly on tenure, partly on internal equity, and partly on retention pressure — keeping a strong performer from leaving by giving them a bigger title — the correlation between "VP" and "enterprise-ready" gets weaker exactly where the population of VPs gets larger.
This is the part internal assumption tends to skip past. A VP who has spent a decade being genuinely outstanding at reward, or at running EMEA, or at leading a specific business unit's people agenda, has built real, hard-won expertise — but they've built it inside a boundary. Someone else set the overall strategy. Someone else owned the trade-offs when their priorities collided with another function's. Someone else held the CEO and board relationship. Being excellent inside a lane and being able to operate with no lane at all — owning the entire people agenda, adjudicating between competing VPs' priorities, being the final word when there's no one above to escalate to — are not the same muscle. A large corporation can easily have several VPs who are exceptional at the first and completely untested on the second, all sitting in the same leadership meeting, several of them privately assuming they're the heir apparent.
Multiply that by a dozen VPs, and you get a leadership team with a quiet expectations problem. When a large HR function has many VPs and no clear, honestly-communicated view of who is genuinely being developed toward the top seat, you end up with several senior people privately operating on an assumption that isn't true — and that surfaces at the worst possible moment, usually when the CHRO role actually opens and two or three VPs who each believed they were the obvious choice discover they weren't even seriously considered. The output of that isn't just one disappointed VP. It's several senior leaders re-evaluating, all at once, whether they have a future at the company- often followed by exactly the departures the organisation was least prepared to absorb.
The honest question a CHRO has to ask about their own VP population isn't "which of my VPs has the title," but "which of my VPs have actually been given something with no lane around it?" A stretch assignment that forced them to own a trade-off across functions. A period covering for me directly, with the CEO or board, without a safety net. A remit that grew because they earned more trust, not because the org chart needed a bigger box filled.
If the honest answer is "none of them, yet"- that's not a crisis, but it is information. It means succession isn't currently sitting inside the building; however, many VP titles suggest otherwise, and either the development plan needs to catch up, or the search needs to be allowed to look outward. What doesn't help anyone, the VPs least of all, is letting a title do the talking for years and leaving several capable people to find out the truth only when the seat actually opens.
The Best VP Candidate Might Still Be an HR Director
This cuts both ways. If title inflation means some VPs aren't as ready as their title suggests, the reverse is just as true: some of the strongest CHRO-adjacent talent in the market doesn't carry a VP title at all.
A Global HR Director in a large multinational might already be leading a team of other Directors, deputising for the CHRO, presenting to the executive committee, and owning a budget and remit considerably bigger than those of a VP somewhere else. Titles track company structure, not scope. Scope is what you're actually buying - whether you're hiring externally or assessing internally.
If you're genuinely open to someone stepping up, that has to be a real position going into the search, not something that sounds open-minded in the brief and then quietly closes the moment a safer, already-titled candidate reaches final interview.
Before You Sign Off the Brief
One useful discipline, whether you're writing an external search brief or reviewing your own succession bench: go through it once more and ask, for each requirement or assumption, is this here because the business needs it now, or because the last person happened to have it - or because the title suggests it should be true?
Roles and assumptions both inherit their predecessor's shape by default. The business moves. Briefs and succession plans that don't move with it end up screening out the person who'd actually fix today's problem in favour of someone who resembles yesterday's solution, or a title that never quite meant what it implied.
About the Author
Ian Mael is valued across his HR network for his diligent communications and authentic partnerships. As the leader for interim HR executive hires at Carter Morris, he brings over 15 years of recruitment experience for multi sector hires within demanding deadlines for the full range of specialist roles within the HR profession.