Head of People

Common hiring mistakes for this role

The consequences of a mis-hired Head of People hit the organization over 18 to 36 months and usually cost between €300,000 and €800,000 directly (severance, re-hiring process, productivity loss), plus indirect damage to the employer brand and to executive-committee cohesion. We observe the four traps below with particular frequency at German SMBs.

1. 01

   Hiring a corporate CHRO for a 250-person SMB

   Profiles from large corporations (5,000+ employees) bring functional depth in specialized sub-disciplines (comp and ben, talent development, international mobility) and a staff of specialists they can draw on. Placed in an SMB with 250 employees, with no comp-and-ben analyst, no recruiting team, no learning specialist, these profiles frequently fail on the reality of doing it themselves: the strategic vision is there, the operational execution power is missing. After 12 to 18 months they leave the company, frustrated by the gap between aspiration and reality, and the company is left with two years of strategic paralysis and a damaged employer brand. Reserve the corporate-CHRO profile for 1,000+ employees or for a company with a clear plan to build a specialized HR staff within 24 months.

2. 02

   Testing strategic vision without testing operational execution

   Interviews at the Head of People level tend to concentrate on strategic discussions (vision, culture, transformation) without testing operational execution power in detail. Profiles with strong rhetorical vision but thin operational reality clear stages 1 and 2 without difficulty; the gap only becomes visible after 6 months, when the first sensitive matters (a complex termination agreement, a co-determination conflict, restructuring preparation) come up and cannot be carried without external advice. The case-study stage (stage 2) with a concrete roadmap and the technical depth interview (stage 3) with precise paragraph requirements are not optional. A pure vision interview produces expensive mis-hires.

3. 03

   Skipping or shortening backchannel references

   At the Head of People level the officially listed references are often prepared and distort the signal. The true assessment comes from backchannel conversations with former peers in the executive committee, former direct reports and former managing directors who were not proposed by the candidate themselves. The three critical questions that only backchannel sources answer honestly: How did this person behave in a real crisis or an executive-committee conflict? What blind spots did you observe? Would you hire this person again tomorrow without hesitation? Shortened backchannel sequences (one reference, superficial questions, no former-direct-report source) produce the most expensive mis-hires, because maturity and integrity cannot be inferred from interviews alone.

4. 04

   Underestimating the tariff-binding and co-determination dimension

   Profiles from tariff-free tech scale-ups or from Anglo-Saxon structures underestimate the legal and political complexity of German co-determination at larger SMBs. A Head of People in a company with a works council and tariff binding must be able to steer hearing procedures under § 99 BetrVG, social-plan negotiations, collective-bargaining preparation and conciliation-board risks in practice, not just know them in theory. Do not hire a profile from a tech-scale-up background into a tariff-bound Mittelstand company with a works council without a very honest discussion of this gap; conversely, a profile from the classic Mittelstand with 20 years of tariff experience will frequently fail in a 200-person Berlin SaaS scale-up on speed, equity logic and international talent competition. Sector and structure type are not interchangeable.