How to Hire a CHRO or Chief People Officer
The CHRO seat is the most misunderstood C-suite role in most firms. Hiring teams that confuse it with senior HR administration get an HR administrator, and then discover, a year later, that the work the role was actually being added to do never got done. 24 Hour Search’s founder spent more than a decade running HR and talent strategy inside operating companies before launching the firm — this is the search we run from the inside out.
Strategy, talent, culture, and the operating system.
A modern CHRO owns the work of translating business strategy into talent strategy: organizational design, workforce planning, executive talent, compensation philosophy, learning and succession, and the operating system underneath all of it. The role exists to make leadership decisions about people as rigorous as leadership decisions about capital.
What the seat actually covers varies by firm. At a vertically integrated commercial real estate operator, the CHRO carries a distributed property workforce alongside corporate. At a professional services firm, the role weights toward partner economics, lateral recruiting, and succession. At a growth-oriented operating company, the work concentrates on building the organization the next stage of the business will need.
The administrative CHRO and the strategic CHRO are different jobs.
The single biggest CHRO hiring mistake is treating the role as senior HR administration and being surprised when the firm cannot make headway on strategic talent decisions. The administrative CHRO runs the HR function. The strategic CHRO builds the organization. Both are real seats. They require different candidates, and confusing one for the other is the source of most CHRO turnover.
- Resources
What sits under the CHRO seat.
Talent acquisition, learning and development, compensation and benefits, HRIS, HR business partners, employee relations. The candidate from a large platform with all of those functions staffed will operate differently inside a leaner firm where the CHRO is also the whole TA function.
- Culture
How talent decisions actually get made.
Founder-led firms make people decisions differently than institutional ones, and operating companies differently than partnerships. A CHRO who has only run talent strategy in one of those structures will operate differently when the structure changes.
- Future
The next stage of the business.
Scaling headcount, integrating an acquisition, expanding into new geographies, professionalizing a founder-led organization. The right CHRO is built for the next stage, not the current steady state. Most CHRO replacement searches trace back to a mismatch on this dimension.
Where CHRO hires fail.
Administrative depth without strategic muscle. Strong HR operations and weak organizational judgment. The candidate runs the function cleanly and never becomes the executive voice on talent the CEO needed.
Strategic posture without HR operating chops. The reverse, and the more dangerous version. Strong talking points, no operating discipline underneath, and a function that slowly comes apart while the CHRO sits at the executive table.
Wrong-stage CHRO. Scale-up CHROs and steady-state CHROs are different candidates. A CHRO built to run a 5,000-person mature organization is doing a different job than one built to professionalize a 200-person founder-led one.
CHRO without the CEO’s ear. A CHRO without an honest working relationship with the CEO cannot do strategic work, no matter how qualified. The chemistry conversation is part of the search, not separate from it.
A search run by a former CHRO.
Kristin Taylor, the founder of 24 Hour Search, spent more than a decade running HR and talent strategy inside operating companies before launching the firm — including senior HR roles at Cushman & Wakefield and Colliers, and Chief Talent Officer leadership at Avenica. She holds the SPHR senior HR credential, the CDR specialization in diversity recruiting, and an Executive MBA. Few searches benefit more from operator-side fluency than this one.
Our process anchors on which version of the CHRO seat your firm is actually filling — administrative or strategic, scale or steady state, integrator or builder. We approach passive candidates directly and reference for both halves of the job. Detail on the engagement structure is on How We Engage.
CHRO searches across all three of our verticals.
24 Hour Search runs CHRO and Chief People Officer searches across Commercial Real Estate, Professional Services, and Growth-Oriented Owners & Operators. Adjacent role pages: COO, CFO, and General Counsel.
Start with the outcome,
not the title.
Tell us what the role needs to do for the business. We will reply personally to begin the conversation.
Start the conversation