Why can a period of interim work make it harder to land a senior salaried HR role?
There is a curious irony in having a successful career as an interim HR leader.
You can spend years being brought into organisations because you are trusted to deal with difficult situations. You are asked to lead transformation, steady a function, support a new CEO, manage a restructuring or take an organisation through a particularly complicated period of change. You build experience quickly and see more organisations, leadership teams and cultures than many permanent HR leaders will encounter in a much longer career.
And yet, when you decide that you would now like a permanent senior HR role, you can find that the experience which made you valuable as an interim is suddenly being viewed through a different lens.
Interestingly, I don't think the main blockage is necessarily the recruiter. Recruiters are often quite comfortable with an interim background. They understand the market, they know why organisations use interim leaders and they can see the value in someone who has accumulated substantial experience across different businesses. A professional who has had to very quickly get to grips with politics, culture and vested interests, in order to solve the problems they’ve been bought in to tackle.
The more interesting blockage can occur further down the process with the senior salaried HR leader who is actually hiring you.
The person hiring you is imagining what it will be like to have you beside them
At senior level, recruitment is rarely just about whether somebody can do the job. A Chief People Officer recruiting an HR Director, or a CEO appointing a senior HR leader, is making a judgement about what it will be like to have that person alongside them. They are thinking about trust, chemistry, challenge, loyalty, influence and longevity.
They are also thinking about whether this person will genuinely become part of the organisation.
That is where an extensive interim background can sometimes create a question. “Will this person really want to be here for the next three or four years?”
It is not necessarily a rational concern. There may be absolutely nothing in your career to suggest that you would leave. But senior appointments involve an element of personal judgement, and people naturally try to make sense of the evidence in front of them.
If the evidence is a career consisting of a number of short and successful assignments, the hiring leader may conclude that you are particularly well suited to being an interim. That can be quite different from concluding that you are somebody who has chosen interim work for a period of time and is now ready to commit to a permanent leadership role.
There can be a psychological difference between hiring an expert and hiring a colleague
This is something that I think is often overlooked.
An interim HR Director is brought in because the organisation needs something from them. They may be expected to bring expertise, objectivity, pace and the ability to challenge the status quo. The relationship is naturally quite transactional, even when it is a very senior one.
A permanent HR leader is different. You are not just buying someone's expertise. You are bringing them into the inner circle. You are potentially sharing difficult conversations with them, relying on their judgement when there isn't an obvious answer and expecting them to challenge you when they believe you are getting something wrong.
The hiring leader therefore needs to believe that the candidate isn't simply capable. They need to believe that the candidate will invest emotionally and professionally in the organisation. That is a different proposition, and it is one reason why a very experienced interim can occasionally find themselves being viewed as slightly outside the organisation, even when they have done exactly the kind of work the organisation needs.
The irony is that interim experience can make someone an exceptional permanent HR leader
There is a case to be made that the opposite should be true.
Someone who has spent several years working across different organisations has probably developed an unusually broad perspective. They have seen leadership teams that work brilliantly and leadership teams that don't. They have seen HR functions that have genuine influence and others that are still fighting for credibility. They have experienced different approaches to transformation, organisational design, employee relations, talent and culture.
They have also learned to operate without the protection of organisational history, internal sponsorship and advocacy. That can be incredibly valuable.
A permanent HR leader who has spent ten years in one organisation may know that organisation extraordinarily well. An experienced interim may have developed the ability to recognise patterns across organisations. Neither is inherently better, but that second capability can be particularly powerful when an organisation is facing something it hasn't dealt with before.
The problem is that the hiring leader may not automatically make that connection.
The hiring leader may wonder whether you will become bored
There is another concern that can sit beneath the surface.
An interim HR leader is often brought into an organisation when something needs to change. You may have spent the last five years moving from transformation to transformation. The permanent role you are interviewing for may involve transformation too, but it will also involve the less dramatic work of embedding change, building capability, managing the inevitable politics and dealing with problems that cannot be solved in three months.
“Will you still be interested when the urgent problem has been solved?” becomes a particularly important (and often unasked) question for a very experienced candidate.
If you have become accustomed to entering organisations at moments of significant change, the hiring leader may wonder whether a steady-state environment will hold your attention. Again, this isn't necessarily fair, but it is a concern worth anticipating.
There is also the fear of being challenged
This one is perhaps even more interesting.
A good interim is normally expected to challenge. You arrive without decades of internal history. You can ask the questions that other people have stopped asking and say that something isn't working without worrying too much about who designed it. That independence is part of your value.
But imagine being the permanent HR leader who is interviewing someone with a very strong interim background. You know this person will see things quickly. You know they will have strong opinions. You know they have operated at your level before. You may therefore find yourself wondering what that will feel like once they are sitting around your executive table rather than being brought in for a defined assignment.
“Will they be a constructive challenger, or will they constantly be comparing us with the organisations they have worked in before?” The strongest candidates understand this dynamic. They don't try to appear less experienced. Instead, they demonstrate that their experience has made them more thoughtful about when to challenge, how to challenge and when to let something develop.
Permanent leadership requires patience
This may be the biggest difference of all. Interim work rewards speed. Permanent leadership often rewards patience.
As an interim, you may have to achieve in six months what someone else might have been given eighteen months to deliver. You learn to move quickly. But in a permanent role, not everything should move quickly. Relationships need time. Trust needs time. Culture needs time. Senior teams need time to change their behaviour. Some of the most important HR work is not visible for months.
An experienced interim who wants to return to permanent leadership therefore needs to demonstrate that they understand the difference. It isn't enough to say that you want stability. You need to show that you want the opportunity to build something over time.
That is a much stronger proposition.
The conversation needs to move beyond your assignments
This is also where I think many experienced interim candidates can improve their positioning.
They talk about what they did, understandably, because they have done a lot. They explain the restructuring, the transformation, the merger, the operating model redesign and the difficult employee relations situation.
But the hiring leader may actually be trying to understand something else. “What kind of leader will this person be if I give them a permanent home?”
That means the conversation needs to move beyond individual assignments and explore how you lead, how you build relationships, how you develop people and how you influence a CEO. It needs to reveal how you handle disagreement, make decisions when there isn't enough information and respond when the answer isn't transformation, but simply better management.
Those things reveal the permanent leader behind the interim career.
Don't apologise for being an interim
I would be very wary of trying to disguise an interim career when applying for a permanent role. There is nothing to apologise for. If anything, trying to minimise it can raise concerns on why you’re uncomfortable with your career, and what you may be trying hide.
The better approach is to explain what the interim period has given you. Perhaps you deliberately wanted breadth. Perhaps you wanted to work across different sectors or business models. Perhaps you found yourself repeatedly being asked to lead complex change. Perhaps the portfolio approach suited you for a particular stage of your life and career.
Whatever the reason, it should sound like a decision rather than something that happened to you.
And then comes the important part. You need to explain why the decision has changed.
The real question is not “Why have you been interim?”
The more useful question is “Why do you want to be permanent now?”
That is the question I would prepare for, not because you need a rehearsed answer, but because your answer says a great deal about how you see the next stage of your career.
If the answer is that you want somewhere to settle, that is understandable. But it isn't particularly compelling to a CEO or Chief People Officer.
A stronger answer might be that your interim career has given you the breadth and pattern recognition you wanted, and that you now want to take that experience into one organisation where you can influence the strategy, develop the leadership team and see the consequences of your work over a much longer period.
That changes the conversation. You are no longer asking them to overlook your interim background. You are showing them why it makes you a more experienced permanent leader.
Perhaps the real issue is familiarity
There is one final reason why an interim career can sometimes create friction with a senior HR hiring leader. Hiring managers tend to feel more comfortable with what they recognise. A conventional career is easy to understand. HRBP, Senior HRBP, Head of HR, HR Director, Group HR Director, Chief People Officer. There is a reassuring logic to it.
An interim career is less linear. It can contain several organisations, different titles and periods that don't fit neatly into the conventional career ladder. That doesn't make it weaker. It simply means the hiring leader has to think a little harder.
And when people are making an important appointment, anything that creates uncertainty can become a reason to choose the safer-looking candidate.
So what should an experienced interim do?
Don't try to become less interesting. Don't pretend that you haven't spent years walking into difficult organisations and solving difficult problems. Instead, make the transition from interim to permanent leadership part of your story.
Show that the breadth of your experience has made you more commercially aware, not less committed. Show that you have learned patience as well as pace. Show that you understand the difference between fixing something and building something. And perhaps most importantly, show the hiring leader that you aren't looking for a permanent role simply because you have had enough of interim work.
You are looking for one because you now know what you can contribute when you stay long enough to make a lasting difference. That is a very different message.
A spell of interim work should not be a career handicap. But at senior level, it does require a little more explanation. Because the recruiter may already understand your CV. The person you ultimately need to convince is the person sitting across the table thinking about what it would actually be like to have you as their permanent HR leader.
And that is a much more personal decision.
About the Author
Sally-Anne is appreciated across her leadership network for her constructive honesty and care. As a senior partner she brings many years of career experience supporting executives in their search for new career challenges, and in their search for high performing talent for their own teams.