Beyond the Résumé: How to Identify the Right Leadership Talent for Your Beauty Brand
The capabilities beauty companies need—and the questions to ask before making your next executive hire.
Hiring the right executive takes more than finding someone with an impressive résumé. Understanding what your business needs today, where it is headed and what kind of leader can help get it there comes first.
In beauty, that means looking beyond a candidate’s functional expertise. A marketing executive may have a strong track record of building a recognizable brand, for example, but can that person connect brand strategy to sales? Can he or she understand the changing realities of the supply chain and retail distribution? Can they work effectively with product development, finance and operations?
The leader who helped a company reach its current level of success may not be the person best equipped to take it to the next stage.
Having worked as a recruiter for more than a decade in the beauty industry, following an earlier career in general recruiting, I’ve seen how important it is to understand the business challenge behind a search. Before identifying candidates, companies need to be clear about what they need their next leader to accomplish.
Here are six capabilities worth considering when evaluating executive talent.
1. Commercial Thinking: Connecting Strategy to Results
A strong executive understands how decisions affect the entire business.
Brand awareness, customer engagement and product innovation are important, but leaders also need to understand margins, pricing, production costs, distribution and sales performance. The specific priorities vary by role, but commercial awareness should extend beyond the boundaries of any one department. Here are PRC Staffing, we are tapped into a range of executives who have developed this 360 commercial point of view.
Tips: When evaluating candidates, look for people who can explain not only what they accomplished but also how their decisions affected business performance.
Ask candidates to walk you through a significant decision. What information did they consider? What trade-offs did they make? How did they measure success? Their answers can reveal how well they connect functional expertise to business results.
2. Cross-Functional Leadership: Interdepartmental Collaboration
Beauty businesses depend on collaboration. Marketing, sales, product development, retail, digital, finance and operations all influence the customer experience and the company’s performance.
A leader may excel within one function but struggle to build relationships across the organization. Yes, many departments operate in silos–but is that best for the business? For careers? As a business model expands, shifts or reshuffles, it can become a significant obstacle.
Tip: Look for executives who not only understand how their decisions affect other teams, but value the benefits of a cross-functional style of collaboration within a business. They should be able to navigate competing priorities, communicate across departments and bring people together around shared goals. Ask questions about how their current or last company supported cross-functional collaboration, or how they sought it out on their own.
3. Digital and AI Fluency: Knowing What Technology Can Do
Technology continues to change how companies research consumers, develop products, forecast demand, create content and manage operations.
An executive doesn’t always need to be a technical specialist, but should understand where technology can improve a process, where human judgment remains essential and how to evaluate whether a new tool is actually delivering value.
For example, in my business, I feel the human touch supports our culture best when interacting with clients and screening candidates. It’s part of our brand, yet I do utilize some AI platforms for behind the scenes work.
I emphasize curiosity, critical thinking and a willingness to learn for our team, as do many of our clients.
4. Adaptability: Matching Leadership to the Company’s Stage
The leadership capabilities can change as the business evolves.
An emerging brand may need an executive who is comfortable building processes from scratch, working with limited resources and making decisions quickly. A larger, established business may need someone experienced in managing complexity, developing leadership teams, with a heavy emphasis on communicating and coordinating across multiple markets or channels.
Tip: Before launching a search, consider what stage your business is entering. Are you building, scaling, restructuring or repositioning? What challenges will the new leader face during the first year?
The answers can help clarify which experiences are essential and which might be less important than they initially appear.
5. Culture Building and People Leadership
At PRC Staffing, finding and keeping the right talent is an important part of our work.
Attracting talent, developing employees, communicating expectations and creating an environment where people can contribute effectively are some keys to employee retention.
In my experience, cultural fit deserves the same thoughtful attention as professional qualifications. For example, I worked with a skincare company hiring for a newly created head of education role. The company had a clear picture of the experience it needed, but the successful hire also had to complement its working culture.
Because I had partnered with the company on previous placements, conversations with stakeholders had given me a strong understanding of the environment: inclusive, family-oriented, collaborative, humble and purpose-driven. I kept those qualities in mind as I screened candidates and helped guide one promising candidate through the interview process.
After several rounds of interviews and in-depth conversations with team members, the candidate received an offer. The placement proved successful, and that person continues to thrive in that business today.
The experience reinforced an important point: a candidate can meet every requirement on paper and still be the wrong hire if the working environment and leadership approach don’t align.
Tip: When assessing candidates, go beyond asking about management style. Ask for examples of how they handled disagreement, developed future leaders, addressed performance issues or guided a team through change.
6. Strategic Vision: Understanding What Comes Next
Beauty leaders know this industry moves fast. Being able to see beyond today’s objectives is key.
They need to have the vision to understand–and maybe even predict–the trends, consumer behavior, competitive pressures, emerging channels and the investments required to support growth. They also need to recognize when change is needed.
Tip: When evaluating strategic ability, ask candidates how they assess opportunities, decide where to invest and determine when to change course. Look for evidence of sound judgment, not just an impressive vision statement.
Companies should also consider whether their next executive will have the authority, resources and support needed to execute that vision. Even the right hire can struggle when expectations and organizational realities don’t align. (See culture fit in #5 above!)
Start With the Business Problem, Not the Job Description
These six capabilities offer a useful starting point, but not every candidate must satisfy them equally.
The right priorities depend on the company, the role and the challenges ahead. A business preparing for rapid growth may need different strengths than one working to improve profitability or reposition an established brand.
That is why PRC Staffing begins an executive search with a conversation about the business itself:
What needs to change?
What must this person accomplish?
Which skills are essential from day one, and which can be developed?
What kind of leadership will help the organization succeed?
We guide our candidates to ask these questions, too. They need to understand the company’s direction, the expectations of the role and whether they will have the resources and authority to deliver.
The best executive hire is a match between what the company needs and what the candidate can—and wants to—deliver.
At PRC Staffing, I believe a thoughtful search starts with understanding that match. Taking the time to define the real challenges behind a hire, companies are better positioned to identify leaders who can make a difference for the firm.
If your company is planning a leadership hire or reconsidering the capabilities it needs for its next stage of growth, I’d welcome a conversation.
Lisa Malatesta
PRC Staffing
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