Every few months I get a brief for a director role where the strongest candidate is already on the payroll. The client rarely argues with me when I point that out. What they want is someone from outside anyway.

I have sat in enough of these conversations to know what is actually going on. It isn't that the market has a deeper bench than the one already inside the business. Most of the time it doesn't. It's that promoting from within means someone senior has to sit down with two or three good people and tell them, out loud and to their face, why they weren't the one chosen. Hiring from outside skips that conversation entirely. Nobody has to explain the decision to a runner-up, because there was no visible competition for them to lose. The disappointment still lands, just quietly, months later, when the internal candidate starts taking calls from people like me.

I run a search firm. I get paid when a business hires someone I found outside the building. I have no commercial reason to write any of this, which is exactly why I think it's worth saying plainly: going external is not automatically the stronger move, and too many boards treat it as the safe one by default.

There are honest reasons to look outside. A business that has genuinely stagnated needs someone without loyalty to how things have always been run. A first director appointment in a function that has never had one benefits from someone who has actually done the job elsewhere, not the person about to invent it from scratch. And sometimes the internal shortlist truly isn't ready, in which case saying so clearly is a better service to them than promoting them past their level and watching them drown.

But those are specific diagnoses. What I see far more often is a board reaching for an external search as a general-purpose answer to "we need a director," in the same way they'd reach for any other procurement decision, without first doing the harder work internally. Has this person been given a genuine stretch assignment to prove themselves against? Has anyone told them plainly where they actually stand? Has the board asked itself why the answer felt obvious before the search even opened?

If you are on a panel weighing this decision, ask yourself the blunt version of the question: could you sit across from your internal candidate and explain the rejection using the real reasons, not "the market was strong this time"? If you can't answer that cleanly, you don't have a hiring problem. You have a conversation you've been avoiding, and an external search is just a more expensive way of continuing to avoid it.

And if you are the internal candidate reading this, wondering why the process felt like theatre from the start: it might not have been about you at all.