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I’m the Founder of LS International, and headhunting isn’t just my job, it’s my passion…
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Lauren Stiebing shared thisA 2025 study found that 41% of large organisations had onboarded someone who wasn't who they claimed to be, according to research published earlier this year. Read that again. A believable deepfake candidate can now be built in roughly 70 minutes. Nearly 60% of hiring managers in Gartner's 2026 research suspect candidates of using AI to misrepresent themselves and Gartner projects that one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028. This isn't fringe. The US Department of Justice has tied fake-worker schemes to more than 300 US companies, including raids on 29 "laptop farms" across 16 states. Which is precisely why Google and McKinsey quietly reintroduced mandatory in-person interviews. At the C-suite level, the stakes go up, not down. So I won't hand a board a finalist they've only ever met through a screen. You're hiring a human to lead humans. Meet the human. When did your hiring process last verify that the person on the call is the person you're actually hiring? This is something I see playing out across searches right now — and it's worth sitting with rather than jumping to an easy answer. The organisations that are getting this right aren't necessarily moving faster or spending more. They're just asking sharper questions at the brief stage. #ExecutiveSearch #Hiring #AI #Leadership #InPersonInterviews #TalentStrategy
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Lauren Stiebing posted this90% of CPG executives are thinking about AI. 6% have a plan to actually create value from it. Let that sit for a second. That's a leadership gap I'm watching most closely as we head into 2026. The numbers around it are just as telling. Bain saw a 24-point jump in executives naming AI and data as a top priority from 2024 to 2025. Prioritization is surging. Execution is stuck at 6%. From the marketing side, BCG found 70% of CPG leaders expect GenAI to make them faster but only 13% have it in real, integrated use. Here's what that tells me from the search side of the table: the bottleneck isn't budget or tooling. It's the absence of leaders who can take a pilot and scale it into the P&L. Every CPG board I talk to wants "someone who's done AI transformation." Almost none of them have that person on the org chart yet. The companies that close this gap won't do it by buying more software. They'll do it by hiring — and promoting — leaders who can connect technology to financial outcomes and actually move the organization. So the real question for the C-suite isn't "what's our AI strategy?" It's "who owns it, and have they ever scaled anything before?" If you're a CPG leader: do you have that person today or are you still hoping AI fluency emerges from the team you already have? #Leadership #Hiring #TalentStrategy #CSuite #Recruitment
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Lauren Stiebing shared thisA hiring manager recently told me he was "too busy" to do the first-round interviews for a VP search. He's about to pay that person north of $300K to run a function he's responsible for. I've been seeing this more and more, and it worries me: hiring managers outsourcing the first interview for their most senior roles. Senior director. VP. C-suite. The shortlist gets handed to a peer, or to talent acquisition, and the manager waits for a recommendation to land in their inbox. I understand the instinct. Everyone is stretched. Interview processes have exploded — senior roles now routinely run five to eight rounds where two or three used to do it and companies are conducting roughly 42% more interviews per hire than they did in 2021. Delegating the top of the funnel feels like a reasonable way to buy back time. It isn't. Here's why. You know what good looks like. You know what your team is actually missing, what the politics are, what the requirements are that never make it onto the job spec. A peer doesn't. So when you put their filter on the front of your process, the most common failure isn't hiring the wrong person. It's rejecting the right one. A peer screens out the candidate who isn't them. They pass on the exact profile you'd have leaned into and you'll never even know it happened, because that candidate quietly disappears from your pipeline. Now look at it from the other side of the table. A senior leader is investing real time, energy and political capital to explore your role. If the hiring manager can't find 45 minutes for a first conversation, the signal is unmistakable: you are not a priority here. And senior people read that signal instantly. The strongest candidates are off the market in about 10 days, and more than half of professionals have walked away from a process because of how it was run [SelectSoftwareReviews; 2025 candidate-experience research]. So let me say it plainly. If you're hiring a senior director or above, this is one of the most consequential decisions you'll make all year. You're handing someone real budget, real headcount, real influence over your strategy. If you can't make time to meet four people for that — how much of a priority is this role, really? The best hiring managers I work with treat the first screen as non-negotiable. They guard those 45 minutes the way they'd guard a board meeting. Because that's exactly what it is. Would you delegate the first conversation for a hire you're betting the next two years of your team on? Or is that precisely the conversation you should be having yourself? #cpg #hiring
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Lauren Stiebing shared thisThe biggest FMCG story of 2026 isn't a mega-merger. It's a wave of deliberate break-ups. → Kraft Heinz announced plans to split into two listed companies but has since paused that process. → Keurig Dr Pepper is separating into a North American beverage business and a standalone global coffee company after its roughly $24B move on JDE Peet's. → Unilever, Reckitt and General Mills have all announced or completed major divestitures. For a decade, boards built conglomerates. Now they're dismantling them to chase focus and it's not a fad. Bain data puts divestitures at roughly half of all consumer-products M&A. Here's what that actually means for the people I place. Every spin-off doubles the C-suite. Two CEO seats, two CFO seats, two CMO seats where there used to be one. And the leader who thrives inside a $50B matrix is rarely the one who can build a focused $8B pure-play from a standing start. They are different athletes. Boards that confuse the two profiles destroy value in the first 100 days — before the strategy ever gets a chance. If your company split tomorrow, would your current C-suite run the new entity — or just the old one? FMCG is going through one of the more interesting leadership transitions I've seen in a decade. The pace of channel disruption: retail media, quick commerce, D2C- means that the commercial instincts that defined a great FMCG career five years ago aren't sufficient anymore. The best operators understand that and are actively building new fluencies. From a search perspective, that's both a challenge and an opportunity. The candidate pool for truly future-fit FMCG leaders is narrower than most hiring managers realise and the competition for that talent is intense. #FMCG #CPG #ExecutiveSearch #Leadership #ConsumerGoods
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Lauren Stiebing posted thisTwo beauty boardrooms just signalled where the industry is heading. Most people are reading them exactly wrong. Coty refreshed its board in March 2026: five new independent directors, Carsten Fischer as Lead Independent, with backgrounds spanning Shiseido, P&G, Ferrari, Bulgari, Pandora, Starbucks and Sephora. The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. announced cuts of up to 3,000 additional roles under "Beauty Reimagined" - its pivot away from a legacy department-store model. The headlines say cost. The substance is competence. From my seat in executive search, here's what I actually see. → Coty's board signals consumer-transformation expertise, not beauty pedigree. The names come from companies that already survived the brand-to-platform pivot. That tells you what Coty wants its next chapter to be, and what it doesn't. → Estée Lauder's restructuring is setting up one of the most consequential commercial-leadership reshuffles prestige beauty has seen in a decade. Whoever inherits the new operating model has to think like an operator, not a brand guardian. →L'Oréal's quieter refresh — Christina Fair into Consumer Products North America, Damien Favre into Dermatological Beauty — shows where the talent flow is going. Internal mobility is back in fashion at the top of the house. What this means if you're a senior leader watching beauty. → The "beauty native" CV is no longer the gold standard. Boards want transferability. → Operating muscle beats brand fluency right now. The brand can be hired. The operating discipline cannot. → The question isn't "what's the next great brand?"It's "what's the next great operating model?" Boards don't restructure when things are working. They restructure when the next decade needs a different kind of leadership than the last one did. Both of these moves point to the same answer. What do you read into these board changes? #Beauty #FMCG #ExecutiveSearch #Coty #EsteeLauder #LOreal #Leadership #CPG
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Lauren Stiebing posted thisBrand loyalty in CPG didn't erode this year. It got rewritten — and the speed should alarm anyone running a national brand. In just six months, the share of US shoppers buying brand-name items exclusively fell 11 points to 10%. Two-thirds now mix brand and private label in the same basket (Zappi, Dec 2025). Here's why "a mix of both" is more dangerous than a clean defection: it means every single purchase is now up for negotiation. The consumer hasn't left you. They've just stopped assuming you. You have to win the trip, every trip. A few more numbers that reframe the picture: – 32% of shoppers now choose the cheapest option that meets their needs, regardless of brand. That's the #1 response — ahead of national brands at 19%. – Insurgent brands captured roughly 40% of US CPG growth in early 2024, despite tiny market share (Bain). – 60% of global consumers now say private-label quality is equal to or better than national brands (McKinsey). The instinct in a lot of boardrooms is to cut costs and protect margin. But you can't cost-cut your way back into relevance. The defense against trade-down is innovation and assortment that consistently feels worth it — not a louder promotion. The brands losing right now aren't losing on price. They're losing on the assumption that their name still does the work. For the brand leaders here: when was the last time you stress-tested whether your consumer actually feels you're "worth it" — versus just familiar? #Leadership #TalentRetention #FMCG #HybridWork #ExecutiveSearch #Culture
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Lauren Stiebing shared thisI'm moderating a conversation I think every CMO, CEO and commercial leader should be paying attention to. The CMO role is changing faster than the organisations around it can keep up. As discovery shifts from shelf and search to algorithms, marketplaces, retail media, social commerce and AI-powered recommendation, one question keeps surfacing: Are we still asking one person to do two very different jobs? Build long-term brand equity. And run an increasingly complex commerce ecosystem. I'm hearing it in boardrooms, in leadership teams, and in executive-search briefs. So we're putting two leaders with very different vantage points on the same virtual stage for an LS Elevate Roundtable: The CMO Split: Brand Stewards and Commerce Operators in the Algorithmic Era Joining me: • Heike Linnemann - former global CMO and trusted advisor to consumer and retail businesses • Bas van Kesteren - Global Head of eCommerce at Opella, and one of the industry's sharpest commerce operators What we'll get into: → What happens when the algorithm makes the first selection, not the consumer → Why commerce economics keep getting harder even as digital investment grows → Whether marketing organisations need new structures and new leadership models entirely → What the agentic era actually means for brands, marketers and the people buying from them If you're a senior leader in CPG, retail, commerce or private equity, I'd genuinely love to have you in the room. Comment "INVITE" below and I'll send you the details. #CMO #MarketingLeadership #FMCGMarketing #ExecutiveSearch
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Lauren Stiebing shared thisCPG Operators are betting against founder autonomy (and #HaileyBieber might prove them wrong), most founder acquisitions in consumer goods fail for the same reason. The founder leaves... or the founder stays without real authority. There isn't much in between. Which is why I think e.l.f.'s acquisition of rhode could become one of the most important case studies in CPG over the next few years because they're attempting something much harder. A third integration model. Instead of fully absorbing the business or leaving it completely independent, they're building around a founder-led, corporate-backed operating model. It's a fascinating leadership experiment. If it works, I think we'll see more consumer companies rethink how they acquire founder-led brands. If it doesn't, it will reinforce why so many acquisitions quietly destroy the very thing they were buying. In this week's newsletter, I break down: • Why I believe the "founder-acquired brand GM" is becoming one of the most important leadership roles in FMCG. • What makes this acquisition structurally different from most founder exits. • Why the real test isn't today... it's what happens over the next 18 months. • And what every board should be watching as the integration unfolds. I've included the timeline, the operating model, and the leadership implications in much more detail. If you'd like to read this edition (and receive future editions), comment "LS" below and I'll send you the signup link! PS: sharing a quick glimpse here. #fmcg #Cpg #newsletter
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Lauren Stiebing posted thisPE firms have quietly rewritten what "operator" means in FMCG. Most leaders have not caught up yet. For most of the last decade, operator meant: scaled a business, managed P&L, hit budget, ran the function. Solid. Bankable. Boardroom-ready. Today's PE-backed FMCG operator is something else entirely. From my seat in executive search, the new operator profile has four traits that you almost never see together: → They have made a hard portfolio cut and stayed to defend it. Not in theory. In practice — through retailer pushback, sales team morale dips, board second-guessing. → They have negotiated directly with a top-five retailer in the last 18 months. Not "overseen" the negotiation. Sat in the room. Held the line on price. → They have moved meaningful pricing or mix within a single fiscal year. Without a three-year transformation program. Without a McKinsey deck. With the team they had. → They can build the bridge. Whether it is between CFO and sales, between investor and brand, between strategic intent and Monday-morning reality. The translation work used to be optional. Now it is the job. Bain's most recent consumer M&A report flags that early execution capability is the single biggest predictor of outperformance in PE-backed CPG hold periods. McKinsey's value creation work in CPG says the same. And every search I have worked on in the last 12 months has reinforced the pattern. What this means for senior leaders: → The "I ran a $2B P&L" line on your CV is necessary, not sufficient. Boards want to know what you did in the first 12 months, not the next ten years. → The transformation arc is overweighted. What sponsors actually want is decisive action, not strategic patience. → If your only PE story is "we sold to a sponsor and stayed for two years," that is a process, not a value creation story. The leaders winning PE roles right now have a sharper way of describing themselves. They do not say they are operators. They say they are "execution leaders." That distinction is doing real work. Curious how others are seeing the shift. What is the operator profile your board is reaching for right now? #PrivateEquity #FMCG #ExecutiveSearch #Leadership #CPG #ValueCreation
Lauren Stiebing commented on a post
5d
What I’ve learned over the years is that people rarely remember every strategy meeting or presentation, but they do remember how a company made them feel and the relationships they built there.
These moments can look simple from the outside, but at scale, they’re often what turns a large organisation into a genuine community.
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Lauren Stiebing liked thisLauren Stiebing liked thisÚltimamente estoy hablando con varias familias en España con patrimonios inmobiliarios muy importantes. Estamos hablando de personas que tienen más de 100 propiedades entre viviendas, locales, garajes... Y, curiosamente, casi todas tienen el mismo problema. Cero deuda. En su día se apalancaron. Compraron. Trabajaron. Amortizaron. Heredaron. Y el resultado son grandes patrimonios con 0 deuda y una sensación de que son ricos y que no deben preocuparse de nada. Mi opinión es que eso es un error. Y quiero dejar una cosa clara. No estoy diciendo que haya que apalancarse para dar un pelotazo. Estoy hablando de utilizar un nivel de deuda muy conservador para mejorar la eficiencia del patrimonio. ¿Por qué? Porque el enemigo de estos grandes patrimonios no suele ser el riesgo. Suele ser el coste de oportunidad. Pensemos en un ejemplo muy sencillo. Imagina un patrimonio inmobiliario de 20 millones de euros libre de cargas. Genera una rentabilidad bruta del 5%. Y la inflación media durante los próximos años es del 2%. Sin hacer nada, el patrimonio ya está creciendo. Pero probablemente menos de lo que debería… Ahora imaginemos que ese mismo patrimonio se refinancia con un LTV del 20-25%. No más. Un nivel extremadamente prudente. Ese capital puede destinarse a nuevas adquisiciones, amortizar deuda más cara o diversificar hacia otros activos con retornos superiores al coste de financiación. ¿Qué ocurre entonces? Que empiezan a trabajar dos motores a la vez. • El rendimiento operativo de los activos. • La inflación reduciendo el valor real de la deuda. La deuda permanece prácticamente constante en términos nominales. Pero los alquileres, el valor de reposición de los inmuebles y, a largo plazo, el valor de los activos tienden a crecer con la inflación. Ese pequeño apalancamiento hace que el retorno sobre el patrimonio aumente sin necesidad de asumir un nivel de riesgo excesivo. No hace falta pasar de un 0% a un 70% de LTV. Muchas veces el salto importante ya aparece con niveles muy bajos de deuda. Y aquí está la reflexión que deben hacer. Si un patrimonio inmobiliario bien gestionado no es capaz de ofrecer una rentabilidad ajustada al riesgo superior a venderlo todo e invertir en un índice como el S&P 500... Algo no se está haciendo bien. Porque el real estate tiene ventajas que la bolsa no tiene. Control directo. Capacidad de crear valor. Ventajas fiscales. Y, sobre todo, la posibilidad de utilizar deuda de forma inteligente. La clave no es deber mucho dinero. La clave es que la inflación trabaje para ti en lugar de hacerlo únicamente sobre un patrimonio inmovilizado. Cada vez veo más familias con patrimonios extraordinarios... pero con estructuras de capital que llevan veinte años sin revisarse. Y muchas veces, un pequeño cambio en esa estructura puede tener un impacto enorme durante la siguiente década.
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Mentoring through support and encouragement so that my mentee may be able to maximize her potential, develop her skills, improve her performance and become the person she wants to be.
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Future leaders need to be equipped to face a very different set of emerging challenges in an environment of rapid change. I am mentoring diverse leaders through the LS Elevate program which is designed to deliver interactive, practical, flexible and agile support to help executives reach positions at the Board level.
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