Talent Availability
Leadership Talent Availability
Where the accessible leadership population is genuinely thin, and what that means for search timetables and offer strategy.
All insights
Availability is not the same as headcount. A function can have thousands of holders and fewer than fifty executives who are both qualified and reachable for a given brief.
We publish the mapping arithmetic for the roles we run most often: population size, approachable proportion, typical response rate and realistic shortlist yield.
Boards use this to set a defensible timetable at the outset instead of renegotiating it halfway through a search.
What the report finds
- Several senior functions have accessible populations of fewer than fifty executives in Europe.
- Response rates fall sharply where the brief cannot be described openly.
- Thin populations require a wider geographic or adjacent-sector frame, decided at mandate stage.
- Realistic shortlist yield is the most useful early signal of search difficulty.
Coverage
Function and geography levelAll practice areasDrawn from completed mapping exercises