Last month, I began recruiting for a General Manager role at a multinational beauty company in the UK. The brief looked straightforward: P&L ownership, retailer negotiation capabilities, and marketing innovation expertise. Standard requirements for a senior commercial leader.But three weeks into the search, the hiring team faced a problem they hadn’t anticipated. Nearly every candidate who looked perfect on paper—accomplished category directors, regional marketing heads, sales vice presidents with fifteen-year track records—struggled in the same way during interviews. They could articulate what they’d accomplished within their domain. They couldn’t explain how that expertise would translate to the broader commercial challenges the role actually required.The issue wasn’t the talent pool. It was the brief. And more fundamentally, it was how the organization was still evaluating commercial leadership through a lens that no longer matches what these roles demand.If your commercial leadership searches aren’t yielding the candidates you need, the problem likely isn’t your recruiter or your employer brand. It’s that you’re still hiring for a model of specialization that your organization has already moved beyond.
What’s Changed in How Commercial Roles Actually Function
The beauty company search exemplifies a broader shift. On paper, it was a traditional GM role. In practice, the successful candidate needed to own the full commercial P&L, negotiate directly with major retailers, understand modern marketing channels from influencer partnerships to retail media networks, and drive innovation in a category where traditional brand-building playbooks no longer deliver results.The job description said “GM with marketing background.” What the role actually required was a commercial operator who could integrate strategy, execution, and P&L management across the entire value chain—without relying on specialized partners to fill the gaps.This pattern repeats across organizations. A recent conversation with a senior commercial executive transitioning from North America to Europe crystallized what’s happening: “Commercial excellence is coming back very strong. That end-to-end shopper journey knowledge—understanding how everything connects from strategy to execution. We became very tactical, very specialized as organizations. That’s reversing now.”McKinsey research shows over 70% of consumer companies have restructured in the past two years, flattening hierarchies and combining functions. When you slim down teams and merge functions, you can’t afford leaders who only know their lane. You need executives who can bridge strategy and execution, translate between commercial and supply chain, and move fluidly between digital and traditional trade without requiring a translator.Yet most hiring briefs still prioritize depth in a single domain over demonstrated breadth across the commercial function. That’s the disconnect.
Why Traditional Hiring Criteria Miss the Mark
The challenge isn’t that specialists lack value. It’s that the criteria you’re using to identify and evaluate them were built for organizational structures that no longer exist.
I see this play out in search conversations regularly. A hiring manager says they need someone with “strong beverage marketing experience” or “fifteen years in sales leadership.” Then three months into the search, they’re frustrated because candidates either lack the breadth the role actually requires, or they’re overqualified specialists who can’t demonstrate how they’d adapt.
The hiring managers who successfully fill these roles do three things differently:
First, they reframe the brief to emphasize cross-functional impact over tenure in a single domain. Instead of “15 years in beverage marketing,” they ask: “Can this person rebuild an e-commerce P&L? Have they led end-to-end innovation pipelines? Have they managed commercial excellence across multiple functions?”
Second, they evaluate for translation skills, not just execution track record. Can the candidate explain how insights from one category inform strategy in another? Can they connect consumer trends across businesses? The ability to transfer knowledge matters more than encyclopedic depth in a single area.
Third, they look for evidence of adaptability in action. The best candidates don’t just claim to be “flexible learners.” They can point to specific moments when they successfully navigated outside their core domain—launching a new channel, entering a new geography, leading a function they didn’t originally own.
Where This Shift Is Most Visible: The Marketing Function
While this transformation is reshaping expectations across all commercial roles, it’s most dramatically visible in marketing leadership. The marketing function serves as the bellwether for what’s happening throughout commercial organizations—because it’s where the gap between traditional specialization and modern requirements has become impossible to ignore.
Today’s commercial leaders can’t lean exclusively on their brand marketing partner, their performance marketing partner, or even their finance partner. They need to bring integrated commercial thinking to the table themselves: connecting brand strategy to channel execution to P&L impact in real time. They need full-funnel marketing acumen because the boundaries between brand building, performance marketing, retail media, and commerce have collapsed.
The traditional CMO profile exemplifies what no longer works—and what’s replacing it shows where all commercial leadership hiring is headed. That profile—built on brand equity studies, annual media plans, agency partnerships developed over decades—worked brilliantly for twenty years. It’s now actively undermining your ability to compete.
Consider the magnitude of the shift: according to eMarketer, digital represents 75% of all advertising spend today, up from nearly nothing two decades ago. Yet many CPG companies remain only 50% digital in their approach. More critically, consumer trust has migrated away from polished brand campaigns toward authentic recommendations from real people. The gap between where consumer attention lives and where marketing budgets flow has never been wider.
The marketing leaders you should be hiring in 2026 look fundamentally different from those who built careers in the 2010s. Old-model leaders guard brand equity, move slowly to preserve consistency, manage external agencies, buy reach through paid media, and operate on annual planning cycles with locked-in budgets. New-model leaders act as growth operators who test constantly, build in-house capabilities, cultivate brand ambassadors who turn customers into marketers, and optimize in real-time with fluid resource allocation.
The hardest part? Many organizations don’t see the shift happening in their own hiring. They think they’re just adding digital as another channel requirement. They don’t realize they’re asking for an entirely different leadership capability—one that requires evaluating candidates through a different lens.
How to Evaluate Commercial Leaders for This Reality
If you’re building a commercial organization for 2026 and beyond, here’s what actually predicts success:
Look for cross-functional fluency in how candidates describe their experience. If their entire narrative centers on results within a single function—even impressive results—that’s a warning sign. The question is: have they rebuilt systems that crossed traditional boundaries? Have they led initiatives that required integrating multiple functions?
Prioritize demonstrated translation ability over category tenure. A candidate who can articulate how they’d approach an unfamiliar category by applying frameworks from their experience is more valuable than one who’s spent twenty years in your specific category but can’t explain how they think beyond it.
Test for adaptability with specific scenarios. Don’t just ask about their greatest accomplishment. Ask them to walk through a moment when they had to lead outside their core domain. How did they learn what they didn’t know? How did they build credibility with teams who were the functional experts?
Evaluate their understanding of how commercial elements connect. Do they understand how retail media strategy impacts trade promotion optimization? Can they explain how influencer partnerships should integrate with traditional brand building? Do they see the P&L implications of channel strategy decisions?
Look for evidence of commercial excellence thinking: revenue growth management, end-to-end shopper journey design, omnichannel strategy integration, commercial capability building. These aren’t buzzwords. They’re signals that a candidate understands how modern commercial organizations actually operate.Today’s commercial leaders can’t lean exclusively on their brand marketing partner, their performance marketing partner, or even their finance partner. They need to bring integrated commercial thinking to the table themselves: connecting brand strategy to channel execution to P&L impact in real time. They need full-funnel marketing acumen because the boundaries between brand building, performance marketing, retail media, and commerce have collapsed.The traditional CMO playbook exemplifies what no longer works—and what’s replacing it shows us where all commercial leadership is headed. That playbook—brand equity studies, annual media plans, agency partnerships built over decades—worked brilliantly for twenty years. It’s now a competitive disadvantage.Consider the magnitude of the shift: according to eMarketer, digital represents 75% of all advertising spend today, up from nearly nothing two decades ago. Yet many CPG companies remain only 50% digital in their approach. More critically, consumer trust has migrated away from polished brand campaigns toward authentic recommendations from real people. The gap between where consumer attention lives and where marketing budgets flow has never been wider.The marketing leaders getting hired in 2026 look fundamentally different from those who built careers in the 2010s. Old-model leaders guard brand equity, move slowly to preserve consistency, manage external agencies, buy reach through paid media, and operate on annual planning cycles with locked-in budgets. New-model leaders act as growth operators who test constantly, build in-house capabilities, cultivate brand ambassadors who turn customers into marketers, and optimize in real-time with fluid resource allocation.The hardest part? Many traditional specialists don’t see the shift happening. They think digital is just another channel to “activate.” They don’t realize the entire decision-making model has changed—from broadcast messaging to community-led growth, from annual campaigns to continuous optimization, from buying attention to earning trust.This same pattern—specialization becoming a liability while breadth becomes essential—is now the expectation for commercial leaders across sales, marketing, general management, and commercial excellence roles.
What This Means for Your Organization
Your commercial organization will continue evolving. Teams will get leaner. The premium on leaders who can operate across traditional boundaries will only increase.
This doesn’t mean expertise is irrelevant. It means expertise without demonstrated breadth is limiting. The executives who will drive your growth won’t be those with the longest tenure in a single category or function. They’ll be those who can say: “I built deep capability here, and I successfully applied it across these other domains.”
If your searches keep yielding candidates who look perfect on paper but lack what you actually need in the role, the issue isn’t the talent market. It’s that your hiring criteria are optimized for an organizational model you’ve already moved beyond.
The era of the deep specialist isn’t ending completely. But the era of evaluating commercial leaders primarily on depth in a single domain—rather than their ability to integrate, translate, and adapt—is definitively over.
For organizations building commercial teams for 2026, the question is simple: are you still hiring for depth, or are you hiring for depth plus range? Only one of those approaches will give you the commercial leadership your organization actually needs.