“...they came up with 3 exceptional people, fully screened and qualified, in just 14 days from taking the brief...proved to be a brilliant hire.”
A VP of HR is one of those titles that can mean so much in terms of experience and skills, which is why finding somebody who already has it on their CV isn't necessarily going to get you very far.
That’s why our VP of HR executive search work starts with the role behind the title.
What will this person actually own? Which decisions can they make without going back to the CHRO? Who sits underneath them? What will their CEO, COO or regional President expect from them? And where does the business need them to be genuinely strong from the day they walk in?
Give us that version of the brief, and we can be much more precise about who is worth approaching. Because HR is the only function we recruit for, and our network includes HR professionals across 94 countries, we're not starting from zero. We can get right into speaking with the people who actually make sense for the role.
Needing a delivery focused, expert partner for your HR hiring needs?
The Problem With Most HR VP Briefs
Every CHRO has sat through this cycle. A VP of HR role opens, the brief gets built collaboratively across stakeholders, and by final sign-off it has absorbed every capability anyone in the room has ever wanted from an HR leader. Nobody added anything unreasonable — and that's exactly the problem.
The question that actually matters isn't what should be on this person's CV. It's what should stop landing on your CHRO desk once they're in the seat. That's a specific, answerable question, and it's the one a generic brief never asks.
Breadth vs. depth
the brief asks the VP to out-expert every specialist in the function, instead of asking them to lead the specialists.
Title vs. readiness
"VP" is a structural label the business assigned, not evidence of what the person has actually been trusted to own alone.
Scope vs. seniority
a Director running a bigger remit is routinely screened out in favour of someone in a smaller VP job with a bigger title.
First, Where Does the VP Actually Sit?
We don't mean on the organisation chart — we mean where they sit when decisions are being made.
That's why we're less interested in finding somebody whose current employer happens to call them a VP and much more interested in where they've actually been operating — what they've owned, who has relied on them and what happened when something important landed on their desk and there wasn't another HR leader above them to sort it out.
What Should Stop Reaching the CHRO Once the VP Is in Place?
A useful way to think about a VP hire is to work backward from the CHRO rather than forwards from the job description.
Six months after this person joins, what should no longer need to land on the CHRO's desk?
A strong VP of HR recruiting brief makes that clear. Are we looking for a genuine deputy, someone to run a substantial part of the function, or a senior operator with a more defined portfolio?
Be Careful Not to Build the VP Everyone Wants
This usually happens with perfectly good intentions. But before you know it, you’re looking for a VP of HR, Head of Transformation, Reward expert, HR Technology leader and future CHRO in the same person.
They might exist. But before we spend your time looking for them, we'd rather work out which parts of that list are actually going to determine whether the hire succeeds.
We tend to think about it in three buckets:
They need to know this properly. The experience they're going to rely on personally.
They need to be able to lead this. Areas where the Director or functional lead underneath them should quite reasonably know more than they do.
They can learn this. Useful experience, but not something that should remove an otherwise excellent person from the search.
That distinction matters at the VP level because breadth is part of the job. Equal technical depth across every corner of HR isn't.
And if the person you've described doesn't really exist, we'll tell you before everybody spends three months waiting for them to magically appear.
How We Search: Hiring for a Gap, Not Just a Title
Before we open a search, we help you get specific about the gap this hire needs to close — the escalations that should stop reaching you, the functions that need pulling together, the strategy that needs translating into execution. That specificity is what lets us assess candidates against your business, not against a template.
Leadership Over Technical Depth
Your new HR VP doesn't need to out-expert your Head of Reward. They need to know enough to ask the question the specialist hasn't been asked yet, and to move HRBPs, HR Ops and CoEs toward one outcome that delivers tangible value to the business. We assess for that integration skill directly — it rarely shows up on a résumé.
Evidence Over Title
We probe what a candidate has actually owned alone, without a safety net — a restructure, a board relationship, a trade-off between competing priorities — rather than accepting the title on their signature block as proof of readiness.
The Market You're Not Seeing
Some of the strongest CHRO-adjacent talent in the market carries a Director title, not a VP one. If you're genuinely open to someone stepping up, we make sure that stays true through to final interview — not just in the brief.
Why Partner With Carter Morris?
We’re a search partner who diagnoses the gap before we ask you to invest valuable time meeting candidates.
Gap-First Briefing
We work with you to pressure-test the brief before it goes to market — separating what this person must know personally from what they need to lead without owning the detail, and from what can genuinely be learned on the job.
Succession-Aware
We look at your internal VP population with the same rigour we apply externally, so you know honestly whether the next CHRO is already in the building — or whether the search needs to look outward.
Scope, Not Signature Block
We evaluate candidates on what they've actually been trusted to decide alone, which means strong Directors and regional leaders get a fair look alongside titled VPs from elsewhere.
Built for the Seat, Not the Seat Before It
Where the brief asks for a future CHRO, we test specifically for the muscles that role requires — the primary CEO and board relationship, setting strategy from a blank page, owning the trade-offs with no one above to escalate to.
What the Engagement Looks Like
A search built around your gap, from brief to appointment:
01
Diagnose
we work through the brief with you and your stakeholders until it describes a gap, not a wish list.
02
Map
we build a candidate map that includes titled VPs, untitled Directors with bigger scope, and internal succession options.
03
Assess
we test for what candidates have owned alone, not what their title implies they've owned.
04
Land
we support the appointment through offer, onboarding, and the first stretch assignments that prove the fit.
The Job Has to Make Sense From Their Side Too
This is one of the easiest things to forget when you're sitting with a vacancy that needs filling.
The person you really want is usually already in a very good job. So while you're deciding whether they're strong enough for your VP role, they're quietly deciding whether your VP role is interesting enough for them.
Part of an effective search process is being able to explain why the right person should take the call in the first place. No need for a grand sales pitch. Senior HR people don’t have time to waste on job description or culture adjectives and hype, and really want to know the realities behind the job description and official company marketing.
That's where knowing the HR market helps. Our senior team stays involved in the search from start to completion, so when we're talking to that Regional VP or Global HR Director, we know the fine details of the role to explain why it might genuinely be worth a move.
What a VP Search Can Look Like When the Brief Is Clear
One of our VP of HR executive search assignments involved finding a Global VP HR for Change and Transformation to report to a newly appointed COO during a wider organisational transformation.
It was a specific and urgent brief. The incumbent had retired unexpectedly, the role was based in a rural location on the US East Coast, and the business needed someone with experience across complex, matrixed international operations who could also develop into a potential successor to the CHRO.
13 Days
Four highly qualified candidates delivered through targeted national and global outreach.
7 Weeks
An offer made to the successful candidate.
Carter Morris delivered four highly qualified candidates within 13 days through targeted national and global outreach. An offer was made within seven weeks, and the successful hire is now performing effectively and receiving mentoring as a potential CHRO successor.
We're not going to pretend every VP search takes 13 days — that would be nonsense. Different markets, locations and briefs create different searches. But senior doesn't automatically need to mean six months of process.
And there isn't a big hand-off once you've signed the paperwork. At Carter Morris, our senior people are involved in the first conversation and stay directly involved managing the search through to the hire, so when something changes or the market pushes back, you're talking to somebody who already understands the thinking behind the brief.
That saves an extraordinary amount of explaining.
VP of HR Recruiting Without the Corporate Song and Dance
There are plenty of HR VP recruiting firms that can give you a very nice presentation about their process.
We'll happily explain ours, but that's probably not the most interesting part.
Carter Morris recruits HR and only HR. We've spent years getting to know HR leaders across generalist and specialist functions in 94 countries, from Regional HR Directors and Global HRBPs through to VPs, SVPs, CPOs and CHROs. And because we're deliberately small, the senior partners who take the brief remain involved through the search rather than handing the work down once the assignment has been won.
What we really need from you is the stuff that isn't sitting neatly in the job description.
Tell us if the remit is still slightly messy. Tell us that the CEO and CHRO don't completely agree on what they want. Tell us there's a brilliant Talent Director underneath the role who absolutely does not need a new boss coming in and trying to teach them Talent.
That's useful information.
The more we understand about what this VP will really be walking into, the quicker we can get past the people who look right on paper and start talking to the people who could actually do the job, and do it successfully within your organization.
Access doesn't guarantee interest, of course. Someone can say no, question the timing, or tell us exactly what changes to the current offer would make the role worth considering — and even that feedback tells us something real about how the opportunity is landing in the market.
What HR Leaders Say About Working With Carter Morris
“I don’t know how they did it, but they gave me a shortlist of 4 exceptional people in under 10 days from taking the brief.”
“On the rare occasions we have needed to conduct package negotiations.......I never feel like I’m being held to ransom....”
Start Your Search for the Right VP of HR
Let's define the gap before we define the shortlist.
If your VP of HR brief has quietly turned into a wish list — or you're not sure whether your succession bench is as ready as the titles suggest — that's exactly the conversation we start with.
Frequently Asked Questions About HR VP Executive Search
-
Yes — if they're already operating at roughly the level you're hiring for.
A Global HR Director leading senior HR teams, regularly deputising for the CHRO and owning significant business decisions might be considerably closer to your VP brief than somebody with the title already. We'd look at the scope behind both titles rather than assuming one is automatically more senior.
-
Look at where final accountability for HR sits.
If this person will be the most senior HR executive, own the overall people agenda and hold the principal HR relationship with the CEO and board, we'd at least question whether VP accurately describes what you're asking them to do.
-
Broad enough that the person can lead across their remit — but that doesn't mean they need to be the technical expert in every HR discipline underneath them.
Be clear about where you need first-hand depth, where you need leadership capability and what a strong VP could reasonably pick up after joining.
-
Not necessarily. A 20,000-person company with a highly centralised HR model can give a VP a very different job from a smaller multinational where they personally own several regions and functions.
We'd look at the actual remit, workforce, reporting structure and decision-making authority before using employee numbers as a shortcut.
-
The truth — including the parts that make the role harder.
If there are two excellent Directors, say so. If the VP will inherit three vacancies and an HR Operations function that needs attention, say that too. You're giving a senior candidate enough information to decide whether this is a problem they genuinely want to own.
-
Usually the substance of the role instead of another VP title.
More ownership, a move from regional to global responsibility, a strong CHRO to work with, access to the executive team or a genuinely interesting business problem can all make somebody take a conversation they weren't planning to have.
-
Every search is different, but typically we can deliver a shortlist of thoroughly assessed and qualified VP candidates in under 21 days. . On one of our recent Global VP HR search projects, Carter Morris delivered four highly qualified candidates within 13 days.
-
Because this is our market, unlike generalist executive search recruiters, Carter Morris only recruits within HR, so we already know all the specialist areas of this function, what is typically expected of senior roles, and the unique challenges typical to the market we're searching in.
Our network includes more than 87,000 HR professionals across 94 countries, and the senior people involved at the start continue to manage and effect the search rather than disappearing once the brief is taken.