Kelvin's Ferret wrote:This is why CEOs and other execs tend to come from a small in-group of people and the skills and experience required is less tangible than certain other well paid, highly skilled roles i.e. you would expect a Consultant Surgeon to be a qualified doctor, with many years of certified training and experience in their specialist field, whereas CEOs and executives may not actually have any specialist skills and experience in their industry and instead have more opaque credentials where their exact contribution is harder to quantify.
I get that to an extent - but in the cutthroat world of private business, if the CEO doesn't have the skills and experience required and therefore doesn't deliver the results the stakeholders you refer to demand, he or she is moved on; with significantly more alacrity than would happen in the public sector.
So whilst I take your point that exec skillsets are not as immediately quantifiable - results are, and they live or die by those results.
I don't necessarily recognise the covert world of interchangeable CEO's you allude to though; to my knowledge - firsthand - that type of appointment is handled by specialist recruiters, and they fish in a large pond; albeit they're not using Indeed or Facebook to source candidates, which is entirely appropriate.
