Leadership hiring in the insurance industry rarely breaks down because organisations lack ambition. More often, it breaks down because ambition turns into over-precision. In an effort to manage risk, boards and executive teams define leadership roles with such specificity that they quietly narrow their own options and weaken the outcomes they are trying to protect.
Across the market, the same concerns surface repeatedly. Senior roles take longer to fill, shortlists feel thinner than expected, and the perception grows that there is a shortage of leaders who are genuinely ready for today’s challenges.
In reality, many of these shortages are self-created. Leadership roles are increasingly designed around idealised combinations of experience, credentials, and sector familiarity that few individuals can realistically offer in one package. The result is slower searches, smaller candidate pools, and boards questioning the market rather than the role itself.
When the Search for the Ideal Leader Becomes the Risk
Most leadership searches begin with sensible intent. Boards want continuity and stability, and they want leaders who can deliver quickly in complex operating environments. To achieve that, job specifications are often built to account for every concern and every historical lesson.
The result is frequently a brief that asks for:
- Deep functional and technical expertise
- Proven experience leading transformation
- Prior leadership at scale
- Direct exposure to the same products, markets, and regulators
- Seamless cultural alignment with the existing executive team
Individually, each requirement makes sense. Collectively, they describe a candidate who rarely exists. What begins as an attempt to reduce execution risk often ends up narrowing the field before the search has properly begun.
This tendency surfaced clearly in our Eliot Insights discussion with Zoe Bazley, focused on challenging talent myths in insurance. When uncertainty rises, organisations default to familiarity. Candidates who resemble previous hires can feel safer, even when the future demands different strengths. What starts as prudent risk management can quietly become a constraint that limits choice, slows momentum, and increases the cost of delay.
The Anatomy of an Over-Specified Leadership Role
A defining feature of many senior insurance roles today is the accumulation of responsibility. Leaders are expected to be strategists, operators, transformation agents, technologists, and people leaders, often across multiple geographies and business lines. Rather than clarifying success, job descriptions expand to absorb every perceived requirement.
This issue is well documented. An analysis of 185 executive-level job descriptions found widespread misalignment between expectations, responsibilities, and experience requirements, suggesting that many C-suite roles are poorly designed before recruitment even begins.
In practice, unclear role design rarely leads to sharper decisions. It leads to longer requirement lists. Breadth becomes a substitute for clarity, and specifications grow as a way of managing uncertainty rather than defining what success will actually look like.
Sector specificity tightens the funnel further. In insurance, prior experience is frequently treated as a proxy for competence, particularly in regulated or technically complex environments. Yet insights from life insurance leaders point to a growing disconnect. Boards increasingly want leaders who understand technology, data, and change, while hiring criteria often remain anchored in traditional experience markers.
The contradiction is clear. Roles are described as future-focused, yet filtered through assumptions shaped by the past.
Structural realities make this approach increasingly difficult to sustain. The insurance industry faces an ageing leadership population and long skill development cycles, meaning that perfectly aligned candidates are becoming scarcer. PwC has highlighted the difficulty of filling key insurance roles and the years required to develop critical capabilities.
When every requirement is treated as non-negotiable, prioritisation disappears. And when everything matters equally, nothing becomes truly decisive.
What Happens When Everything Is Non-Negotiable
Over-specification changes who engages with a role. It does not simply reduce application volume. It reshapes the candidate pool itself.
Research from the Behavioural Insights Team shows that candidates typically apply for roles when they meet around half of the listed requirements, yet longer and more rigid requirement lists significantly reduce application rates overall.
Senior leaders, particularly those with strong judgement and career optionality, tend to read highly prescriptive briefs as signals. They often interpret them as signs of inflexibility, unclear success measures, or unrealistic expectations. As a result, many of the strongest candidates choose not to engage at all.
What remains is a narrower pool that may align neatly on paper but lacks the adaptability and leadership judgement boards ultimately value most.
This narrowing effect is frequently misread as a market shortage. According to IDEX Consulting, 52 percent of insurance employers cite a lack of suitable applicants as their biggest hiring challenge.
The statistic is real, but it does not tell the full story. In many leadership searches, the pool is constrained long before the market has had a genuine opportunity to respond. The issue is not simply availability. It is how the role has been framed and filtered.
When the Market Pushes Back
A revealing moment in many senior searches arrives midway through the process. Once real candidates are assessed, assumptions begin to shift.
Boards often find themselves quietly re-prioritising what matters most:
- transformation capability over perfect sector symmetry
- leadership judgement over technical completeness
- cultural contribution over cultural similarity
This recalibration reflects a broader shift discussed in Eliot Insights conversations on leadership priorities in volatile markets. As operating conditions become less predictable, adaptability and decision-making under uncertainty increasingly define leadership effectiveness. Yet these qualities are rarely prioritised clearly at the specification stage because they are harder to codify and easier to overlook.
Mid-search reprioritisation is not a failure of planning. It is often the first honest conversation about what the organisation truly needs from the role, rather than what it hopes to avoid.
Why No Strong Leader Is Ever Complete
At executive level, perfection is a myth. Every leader brings trade-offs. Depth in one area limits exposure in another. Experience sharpens judgement, but it also creates blind spots.
Harvard Business Review has warned that waiting for the perfect candidate delays hiring and weakens outcomes, arguing instead for a more thoughtful evaluation of trade-offs.
This mirrors what Eliot Partnership sees consistently in practice. Leadership failure is more often driven by misaligned expectations than by insufficient capability.
High-performing organisations therefore approach leadership as a system rather than a single appointment. They hire individuals who complement existing strengths instead of replicating them, and they build teams capable of covering gaps without turning every hire into an impossible specification. As leadership demands continue to evolve, the ability to build around oneself becomes as important as personal expertise.
Redesigning Leadership Roles Around Outcomes
The most effective leadership searches begin with outcomes rather than profiles. Instead of asking who fits the brief today, boards benefit from asking what must be different in eighteen to twenty-four months’ time.
What problems must this leader solve. What capabilities must they build within the organisation. What decisions will ultimately define success.
This outcome-led approach is becoming increasingly critical. In KPMG’s 2025 Insurance CEO Outlook, workforce readiness and upskilling are identified as major constraints as artificial intelligence reshapes operating models and leadership demands.
Static experience checklists struggle to keep pace with this level of change. Outcome-based role design is more resilient because it anchors the search to what the business needs to achieve, rather than what the last leader happened to have done.
Once outcomes are clear, requirements can be ranked realistically. True must-haves tend to be few and directly linked to delivery. Everything else becomes developable, coachable, or complementary through team design.
Hiring for trajectory rather than symmetry reflects how leadership actually works. The strongest appointments are rarely perfect matches on paper. They are leaders with judgement, learning capacity, and resilience, combined with the ability to build the right capability around them.
Letting Go of Perfection Strengthens Leadership
Over-specification does not reduce risk. It delays decisions, narrows talent pools, and weakens long-term outcomes.
The most consequential decision in leadership hiring is not who to appoint, but how the role is defined. As the Eliot Insights series consistently shows, insurance leadership is being reshaped by complexity, technology, and change. The leaders who succeed will not be those who tick every historical box, but those who can adapt, build, and lead through uncertainty.
For boards, the question is no longer whether the perfect candidate exists. The more important question is whether continuing to search for them has quietly become the greatest risk of all.
