Leadership Decision Advisory · Appropriate Use
The candidate insights brief is for your hiring team.
It should not be shared with the candidate, even after you hire them.
This brief was written to help you and your interview team make one decision: whether this person is right for this role.
It is candid on purpose. It names strengths, but it also names risks and the questions still worth probing, because that is what you need to choose well. That same candor is what makes it the wrong document to hand to the person it describes.
The question comes up often, usually with good intentions. The hire went well, the new leader is curious about their results, so why not pass the brief along? Here is why not, and here is the better thing to do instead.
Why this isn't right for the candidate
It was written to evaluate them, not to help them.
Every line was chosen to inform your decision. The focus is on fit and risk, and it assumes a reader who is weighing the candidate, not the candidate weighing themselves. Read from the inside, it does not land as insight. It lands as a verdict.
The language needs interpretation, and reads as criticism without it.
Assessment reports use words that mean one specific thing to a trained reader and something much harsher to everyone else. A term like “reserved” or “derailer” points to a tendency worth watching. To the person reading about themselves, it sounds like a flaw someone wrote down. These reports were never meant to be read without someone there to frame them, and framing is exactly what a forwarded file loses.
The timing does real damage.
A new leader is still trying to establish themselves, before they have had a chance to show what they can do. Handing them a list of their predicted risks in the first few weeks undercuts their confidence at the worst possible moment, and it quietly changes how they read every interaction with the boss who commissioned it. What was meant as a gift becomes something they cannot unsee.
It is the wrong tool for development.
A selection brief is a snapshot taken to answer a hiring question. It is not a development plan, and used as one it sends people to work on the wrong things. Someone reads a single line, draws a conclusion about themselves, and fixes a problem they may not have.
The Better Move
Give the new leader something built for the job ahead.
There is a right way for a new leader to benefit from what the assessment surfaced. It is a different document, built for a different job: the new leader integration brief.
First, it is written from the start to be shared.
It carries the person's own results, reframed as a starting point for the work ahead rather than a list of risks, and it is best delivered as a working session with you and your new leader together, so the conversation is grounded and pointed forward from day one.
Second, I am not starting from a blank page.
I already hold the role success profile we built at the start of the search, which spells out what this seat actually demands. And I hold this person's assessment results, which show how they are wired to lead. Put those two together and you have an unusually strong foundation for a 90-day plan, aimed squarely at the space between who this leader is and what the role will ask of them.
Most onboarding plans get assembled from scratch, out of memory and good intentions. This one is built from evidence you already paid to gather.
And it comes off your plate. Designing a real onboarding plan for a senior hire is work, and it lands on you exactly when you have the least time for it. This is work I can do from material already in hand, and hand back as something you and your new leader can run with immediately.