If financial leadership is inadequate, the company may need a CFO or Finance Director. If there is nobody accountable for day-to-day operational performance, a COO may be the better appointment. If the underlying problem is largely diary management, administration and access to the founder, excellent executive support may solve it without creating a broader strategic position.

This diagnosis matters because Chief of Staff can otherwise become a convenient title for responsibilities that have no obvious home.

For businesses still deciding whether the role itself is appropriate, our guide to hiring a Chief of Staff in a growth company looks in more detail at when the position becomes valuable and how it fits into a scaling leadership team.

A useful way to develop the recruitment brief is to work backwards from the outcome.

Six or twelve months after the appointment, what should the founder be doing less of? What should they have more time to concentrate on? Which initiatives should be moving more effectively? How should the leadership team interact differently?

A good Chief of Staff creates leverage for the founder and the wider executive team. That might mean coordinating strategic priorities across several functions, improving preparation for leadership and board decisions, driving important projects or creating greater discipline around follow-through.

Board and investor work can form part of the remit as well. A Chief of Staff may coordinate board materials, track actions following meetings, support investor communications and ensure decisions translate into activity elsewhere in the organisation.

That does not make them a substitute for a CFO, Company Secretary or investor relations specialist. Their value often lies in connecting work that sits between established functions.

The founder should ultimately have greater capacity for the work only they can do, rather than simply acquiring another person who attends the same meetings.

This is one of the most important questions to resolve before recruitment begins.

Both appointments are sometimes considered when a founder-led company has become too dependent on its Chief Executive, but they usually solve different problems.

A COO normally owns substantial parts of the organisation. They may be accountable for operations, customer delivery, people, technology or other functions and generally have clear decision-making authority. Their success can be measured through the performance of those areas.

A Chief of Staff usually works across the organisation without owning it in the same way. Their authority comes partly from the founder and partly from their ability to influence other senior leaders. They create alignment, provide additional capacity around strategic priorities and deal with work that falls between functions rather than permanently taking responsibility for those functions themselves.

A useful test is to imagine the founder disappearing for a month.

If the business needs somebody to take control of day-to-day operations in their absence, the requirement may be closer to a COO.

If the executive team is perfectly capable of running its respective functions but the founder needs greater capacity to coordinate priorities, prepare decisions and drive important cross-company projects, a Chief of Staff may be more appropriate.

There is no standard answer because companies use the position in fundamentally different ways.

Some treat Chief of Staff as an accelerated development role for an exceptional high-potential individual who may eventually move into general management, operations or another leadership position.

This can work extremely well where the founder needs analytical capacity, project leadership and somebody capable of learning rapidly through broad exposure to the business.

Other companies need considerably more experience.

A business preparing for a major funding round, undertaking acquisitions or navigating significant organisational change may require somebody who has already operated around boards, investors and senior executives.

Asking a relatively junior Chief of Staff to influence an established leadership team without sufficient credibility can leave them accountable for outcomes without possessing the authority or experience required to achieve them.

The right level of seniority should therefore follow from the problems the person will be expected to solve rather than from Chief of Staff salary benchmarks or how another company has structured the position.

Searching only for existing Chiefs of Staff can unnecessarily restrict the candidate market.

Strong candidates can come from strategy consulting, corporate development, investment banking, operations, finance, venture capital or roles within other growth businesses. Some will already have held the title, but previous title matching is less useful here than in many executive searches because the remit varies so widely between organisations.

The more useful question is which experiences have developed the capabilities required by your particular brief.

If the role is heavily focused on strategic projects and investment, candidates with consulting, corporate development or transaction experience may be relevant.

If the requirement is more operational, individuals who have already coordinated complex projects across functions may be stronger.

If the Chief of Staff will work extensively with investors and the board, experience of those environments may carry considerably more weight.

Defining the candidate market around comparable problems rather than matching job titles usually produces a stronger search.

The precise profile varies, but several capabilities tend to matter across founder-led businesses.

A Chief of Staff may move from a discussion about commercial performance to fundraising, organisational design or an operational problem within a single day.

They do not need to be the expert in every room, but they need to understand unfamiliar subjects quickly, ask sensible questions and recognise when specialist input is required.

Founder-led businesses rarely need another person who is simply good at generating ideas.

They generally need somebody capable of taking an ambiguous priority, determining what needs to happen and ensuring it progresses despite competing demands elsewhere in the organisation.

Candidates whose backgrounds are highly analytical but who have never been accountable for implementation should therefore be assessed carefully.

A Chief of Staff frequently needs colleagues to act without directly managing them.

They need sufficient confidence to challenge senior executives without creating unnecessary friction and enough judgement to distinguish between representing the founder's view and expressing their own.

If colleagues regard the Chief of Staff primarily as somebody who reports their activity back to the founder, trust can disappear very quickly.

A close working relationship with the founder is essential, but unquestioning agreement is not.

The strongest Chiefs of Staff understand how the founder thinks while retaining enough independence to challenge assumptions and recognise when the organisation needs something different.

A Chief of Staff who merely reinforces the founder's existing behaviour can increase dependency rather than reducing it.

The position can provide unusual visibility across the organisation, including board discussions, remuneration, fundraising, performance issues, recruitment and future organisational changes.

Technical capability will not compensate for poor judgement around sensitive information.

Traditional competency questions have a place, but the ambiguity of the role makes scenario-based assessment particularly useful.

Candidates can be given real examples of the kinds of problems they would encounter and asked how they would approach them.

What information would they need? Who would they involve? What would they handle personally? What would they delegate? When would they bring an issue back to the founder?

The quality of the questions candidates ask can be as revealing as the solution they eventually propose.

Past experience should also be examined at the level of personal contribution.

If somebody describes leading an important strategic project, what did they personally do? How did they secure cooperation from people they did not manage? What happened when priorities conflicted? Where did the project encounter resistance, and how did they respond?

The objective is to establish whether the candidate can operate effectively in ambiguity rather than simply whether they have previously worked somewhere impressive.

The founder will naturally play a major role in choosing their Chief of Staff. Chemistry matters when two people will work closely and discuss some of the most sensitive issues within the organisation.

But recruitment should not become a two-person process.

Other members of the leadership team should normally meet shortlisted candidates because much of the Chief of Staff's effectiveness depends upon their ability to work through those executives.

A candidate the founder finds impressive but the rest of the leadership team does not trust is unlikely to succeed for long.

The search process should therefore assess two relationships simultaneously: whether the candidate can become a trusted partner to the founder and whether they can establish credibility across the wider organisation.

This question can determine whether the appointment succeeds regardless of candidate quality.

Founders sometimes recruit a Chief of Staff because they recognise that they need greater capacity while remaining reluctant to relinquish access, information or decision-making.

The new hire then becomes another person attending meetings, preparing information and coordinating activity without fundamentally changing how work reaches the founder.

Before recruitment begins, it is therefore worth identifying which responsibilities the founder is genuinely prepared to delegate.

If every meaningful decision must continue to return to the same person, hiring a Chief of Staff may increase the number of interactions around the founder without actually reducing dependency upon them.

This is particularly important within growth and founder-led companies, where the leadership structure often has to evolve alongside the founder's own role.

Chief of Staff recruitment presents an unusual search problem because searching by job title can be actively restrictive.

The strongest candidate may currently be a Chief of Staff, but they could equally be working in strategy, corporate development, operations or another position that has developed the combination of analysis, judgement and execution the company requires.

The relevant talent pool also changes substantially with the seniority of the brief.

A founder looking for a high-potential future business leader will search a different market from a CEO who needs an experienced strategic operator capable of working alongside investors and an established executive team.

Defining that market correctly is therefore part of the search itself.

A structured executive search can identify candidates based on comparable experience and capability rather than simply approaching people who already carry the Chief of Staff title.

That is particularly valuable where the strongest potential candidates are not actively applying for Chief of Staff vacancies and may not have considered the role until approached about a specific opportunity.

Fram Professionals recruits Chiefs of Staff and senior leadership professionals for founder-led, VC-backed, private equity-backed, AIM-listed and PISCES businesses across the UK.

The starting point for a Chief of Staff search is understanding what has changed within the organisation and what the founder needs to be able to do differently once the appointment has been made.

That determines the remit, seniority and candidate market far more effectively than treating Chief of Staff as a standard executive position.

For founder-led companies, a successful Chief of Staff should ultimately create capacity rather than simply absorb work.

The founder should have more time for the decisions only they can make, the executive team should have greater clarity around priorities and important initiatives should move through the organisation with less dependence on constant founder intervention.

Achieving that requires somebody whose judgement, influence and ability to execute are suited not only to the individual founder, but to the business they are trying to build.

If you are considering recruiting a Chief of Staff for a founder-led or growth business, or would like to discuss the appropriate candidate profile before beginning a search, contact Fram Professionals for a confidential discussion.