You’ve mandated return-to-office. You’ve invested in collaboration spaces, culture initiatives, and getting your teams physically together. You believe — rightly — that the best work happens when people share a room. So I have a genuine question for you: why are you still hiring your most senior leaders through a series of video calls?
I’ve spent over a decade placing VP to C-suite executives across consumer goods, food & beverage, and retail. And over the past year, I’ve watched a troubling pattern take hold — one that’s quietly costing companies time, top-tier talent, and significant money. Almost nobody in our industry is talking about it.
But the market has shifted. In 2026, the very depth that once made you valuable can make you rigid.
The Pattern That’s Derailing Executive Searches
Here’s how a typical executive search unfolds today. HR screens a candidate over video. They like them — maybe they really like them — but they’re not sure. So they pass them along to the hiring manager for another video call. It goes well, but there’s no real conviction. Nobody leaves the call ready to champion this candidate through the inevitable gauntlet of stakeholder alignment that every senior hire requires.
So what happens? More video calls get scheduled. Another stakeholder weighs in. Then another. The process stretches from weeks into months. And throughout, there’s a persistent fog of uncertainty that never quite lifts —
because video calls simply don’t generate the kind of conviction that drives decisions forward.
Meanwhile, your top candidate — the person who could have been a clear yes after a single in-person meeting — either loses momentum, loses patience, or takes another offer. Or perhaps worse: you default to an internal candidate, not because they’re the stronger choice, but because they’re the person people already know and feel comfortable with.
I’ve seen this pattern derail searches at some of the most respected names in consumer goods. And when I stepped back to examine why searches were taking so long and producing so much indecision, the answer was almost embarrassingly simple.
Suddenly, leaders aren’t running single-category fiefdoms. They’re steering cross-functional, leaner teams where breadth wins over depth. The “10,000-hour expert” who mastered one domain is getting passed over for the leader who can connect three.
Video Creates Doubt. In-Person Creates Conviction.
Think about the last time you met someone face-to-face after knowing them only on video. The experience was fundamentally different, wasn’t it? You got more signal in twenty minutes in the same room than you did in an hour on Teams.
This is the crux of the problem. On video, you receive a flat, compressed version of a person. You can assess competence. You can evaluate communication skills. But you rarely get the kind of energy, presence, and human connection that makes you say: this is the one — I’m going to fight for this person.
“At the executive level, conviction is everything. Someone has to champion the candidate through the organization. That kind of championing doesn’t come from a 45-minute video call where half the panel was glancing at their second screen.”
Hiring a senior leader is never a solo decision. It requires alignment across multiple stakeholders, each with their own priorities, concerns, and political considerations. For a hire to get across the line, someone in the room needs to be genuinely passionate about the candidate. They need to have felt something — a real connection, a clear signal — that gives them the confidence to advocate. And that simply doesn’t happen over video with anything like the same frequency or intensity that it happens in person.
I’ve watched candidates who were merely solid on Teams become magnetic when they walked into an office — energized by the brand, the culture, the team they’d be joining. Their body language, spontaneity, and the way they think on their feet all come through in ways a webcam cannot capture. And yes, the reverse happens too. Some candidates are better on screen than they are in the room. But that’s precisely the point. You need to know this before you extend an offer — not six months into the role when the fit isn’t there and you’re looking at a costly mis-hire.
The AI Problem Nobody’s Addressing
There’s another dimension to this that’s becoming impossible to ignore. In a world where artificial intelligence can coach candidates in real-time during video interviews — listening to questions, generating responses, and feeding polished answers through a second screen — the video interview is no longer the reliable assessment tool it once was.
Meeting someone face-to-face remains the single most reliable way to assess how a person actually thinks, reacts, and communicates under authentic conditions. You can see how they handle an unexpected question, how they engage with the energy in a room, how they carry themselves when there’s no digital filter between you. No AI can replicate genuine presence.
The Omnichannel Irony
Here’s what strikes me as particularly contradictory. Consumer goods leaders talk about omnichannel strategy every single day — the seamless integration of digital and physical experiences. You preach it to your teams, your boards, your investors. Your companies are spending billions to get the balance right between online and in-store.
Yet when it comes to arguably the most consequential decision a leader makes — who joins their executive team — many organizations have gone entirely digital, or waited too long into the process to meet the candidate in person. You’re mandating that employees return to the office at least three days a week, but you won’t invest a single day to meet the person you’re about to pay $300,000 or more to lead a critical function of your business.
The inconsistency is striking. And it deserves examination.
What Actually Changes When You Show Up
I want to be clear: I’m not advocating for the elimination of video interviews. A first-round screen over video makes perfect sense. Nobody needs to travel for an initial conversation. But by the second stage, if there’s genuine interest on both sides, the next meeting should happen in person.
The searches I’ve been involved in that close fastest — and that produce the strongest long-term outcomes — are consistently the ones where a real human connection happened early in the process, not as an afterthought bolted on at the final stage.
Here’s what changes when in-person interviews happen early:
Decisions accelerate dramatically. You leave a face-to-face meeting with clarity. It’s either a strong yes or a clear no. That certainty compresses the entire timeline and eliminates the cycle of additional stakeholder calls that delays so many searches.
Candidate engagement deepens. Top executives notice when a company invests the time and effort to meet them properly. It signals seriousness, respect, and organizational maturity. Remember — the best candidates are evaluating you with the same scrutiny you’re applying to them.
Stakeholder alignment becomes far easier. When the hiring champion has genuine conviction — the kind that only comes from meeting someone in person — they are vastly more effective at bringing the rest of the team along.
You see through the noise. In-person interaction strips away the curated, AI-assisted, camera-ready version of a candidate and gives you the real person. At this level, that’s everything.
The Cost of Not Doing This
I understand the objections. Scheduling is harder. People are busy. Flights cost money. But let’s be honest about the math. A domestic flight costs $500. Even flying five shortlisted candidates to your headquarters is a fraction of the cost of a single mis-hire at the executive level — which, by most estimates, runs between one and three times the annual salary once you account for lost productivity, severance, and the cost of restarting the search.
These are roles paying well over $200,000. The companies engaging us are making strategic investments in leadership. And yet the resistance I encounter most often is not about strategy — it’s about convenience. It’s easier to stack three Teams calls in an afternoon than it is to block a full day for in-person interviews. But easier is not better. And in this case, the pursuit of convenience is actively undermining the quality of hiring decisions.
A Wake-Up Call — Starting With Ourselves
I’ll be candid: this realization applies to our industry as well. At LS International, we’ve always operated as a high-touch, relationship-driven firm. We meet our candidates. We meet our clients. But I’ll admit that even we had begun drifting toward the convenience of video-only processes. COVID changed the norms, and somehow, three years later, the executive search industry never fully corrected course.
We’re correcting it now. We’re building face-to-face interaction into every stage of how we work — not as an optional extra, but as a core part of the methodology. Because after fifteen years of placing senior leaders across some of the world’s best-known consumer brands, I can tell you with certainty: the placements that stick, the hires that transform businesses, almost always involved someone, somewhere in the process, making the effort to show up in person.
“If you wouldn’t have hired your best-ever executive based solely on video interviews, why would you settle for that process now?”
The companies that win the competition for exceptional executive talent won’t be the ones with the most efficient Teams workflows. They’ll be the ones willing to show up — literally, physically — for the people they want to lead their business. In a world that’s become overwhelmingly digital, that willingness to invest real time and real presence has become a genuine competitive advantage.
It’s time to get back to what works.