What Director–VP hires actually want, in their own words

Over a run of Director–VP conversations, we started writing down the first reason a candidate gave for being open to a move, unprompted. The pattern was striking for what it left out. Compensation came up — it always does — but rarely first, and almost never as the thing they lingered on. What they lingered on was the shape of the role: whether it owned a real outcome, whether the decisions that mattered would actually be theirs, whether they’d be able to point at something a year in and say that they built it.

The perks — the campus, the wellness budget, the sabbatical policy — got mentioned when we asked directly, and forgotten the instant the conversation turned to why this role. A senior person has usually had the amenities before. They’re not moving toward a nicer floor. They’re moving toward a bigger version of the job they already know how to do.

Three things recur. Scope: how much of a problem is genuinely theirs to own, versus a slice of someone else’s. Mandate: whether the authority on paper survives contact with the parent’s decision rights, or evaporates the first time a hard call gets escalated. And line of sight to impact: whether they can see how their work reaches the business, or whether they’ll spend two years executing decisions made elsewhere without knowing if any of it landed.

Every one of those is an experience question, not a benefits question. It is decided long before day one — in how the role was scoped and how honestly it was described. The centres that keep their senior hires are the ones where the role the candidate imagined and the role they arrived to were the same role.

When two offers are close on money — and at this level they usually are — the deciding factor is which one the candidate can picture more clearly. The winning offer names the mandate in specifics: the outcome they own, who they answer to, what they get to decide alone. The losing offer talks about culture and campus and hopes the candidate fills in the rest.

Precision reads as respect, and respect reads as a role that’s been thought through. If you can’t describe the mandate concretely, the candidate assumes it doesn’t exist yet — and a senior person will not bet a good career on a role someone is still inventing.