When Nobody Wants the Chair

Open a German business page this year and the story is contraction. Industrial output has fallen for a fourth consecutive year. Manufacturing associations describe 2026 as a year of stagnation at best, weighed down by energy costs, trade friction and a competitiveness problem that has been building since 2018. Automotive, chemicals and parts of machinery have all shed headcount. On the surface, this reads like a buyer's market for talent.

It is not — not at the top. Beneath the headline contraction sits a leadership gap that has been widening for a decade. Germany's Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft puts the average shortfall of qualified candidates for leadership occupations at close to 28,000 in 2025, nearly double the figure from ten years earlier. The gap is worst not in the boardroom but one and two levels below it — team, department and divisional leadership — and it is worst of all in exactly the businesses Jenova Partners was built to serve: industrial Mittelstand companies where a leadership role also requires real technical depth in production, operations, engineering or technical sales.

Put simply: the DACH region is shedding jobs and starving for leaders at the same time. Both things are true, and both shape how a search has to be run.

Why Fewer People Will Take the Chair

Part of the shortage is demographic. Experienced managers are retiring faster than they are being replaced, and the working-age population feeding into leadership pipelines is shrinking. But the more interesting part is behavioural: classic leadership roles have become less attractive, not more. The expectations attached to them have grown — leading a transformation agenda, absorbing a skills gap in the team, holding a P&L under margin pressure — while the supply of people willing to take that on has not kept pace.

This matters for how a search brief gets written. A mandate that simply asks for "a strong operations leader" will surface plenty of technically excellent candidates who have already, quietly, decided they do not want the exposure that comes with the title. The search has to identify who among the technically qualified population still wants to lead — and that population is smaller, harder to reach, and considerably more selective about who approaches them.

A Candidate's Market at the Top

Switzerland illustrates the same dynamic from a different angle. Unemployment there remains among the lowest in Europe, and at senior level the overwhelming majority of credible candidates are not visible on any job board — they are performing well, not looking, and reachable only through direct, discreet approach. Life-sciences hiring around Basel shows a similar split to the one playing out in German manufacturing: large-scale restructuring at the volume end of the business coexists with lengthening, harder-to-fill searches for regulatory, clinical and manufacturing leadership roles that require both technical depth and international regulatory fluency.

The practical consequence is that reach matters more than it used to. A search built on advertising and inbound applications will return the population that is already looking — which is disproportionately the population currently between roles, or overlooked, or both. The stronger candidates are the ones who need to be found, engaged carefully, and given a reason a well-run current position does not already give them.

Why the Search Firm's Reputation Decides the Outcome

Because the pool of senior leaders who are both qualified and willing is thin, it is also tightly networked. In most DACH sub-sectors, the credible candidates for a given mandate know one another, sit on the same industry committees, or have worked together at some point in the last fifteen years. A search conducted carelessly — a name surfaced before it should have been, a confidential mandate discussed loosely, a candidate approached without context — does not stay contained to that one process. It becomes part of how the market reads the hiring company, and how it reads whichever advisor ran the search.

This is why boards and owners increasingly treat the choice of search partner as a decision in its own right, not a procurement exercise. The questions worth asking of any firm are less about fee percentage than about how the firm behaves under pressure: whether outreach is blind until there is genuine mutual interest, whether references are taken only with explicit consent, and whether the firm has a track record specific to the sector rather than a generic claim of reach.

• Blind, context-first outreach — the mandate is introduced before the company is named.
• Consent-based referencing, with the candidate told in advance who will be contacted.
• A retained structure with a genuine replacement guarantee, not a contingent race to present names first.
• Sector fluency that lets the advisor sell the mandate credibly, not read it back from a brief.

The Offer That Does Not Survive the Notice Period

The most expensive failure mode in DACH executive hiring is not the search that finds no one. It is the search that finds the right person, secures a signed offer — and then loses them before the start date. Two structural features of the region make this more common than it is elsewhere.

The first is notice periods. Senior contracts across Germany, Austria and Switzerland routinely carry notice periods running to three, six or more months. That window is long enough for a candidate's current employer to construct a serious counteroffer — a revised title, a retention bonus, a promise about the succession conversation — and long enough, too, for a competing opportunity to surface and reopen a decision the candidate thought they had already made.

The second is the counteroffer itself. Research on this is consistent well beyond DACH. In one widely cited Harvard Business Review study of several hundred senior executives and HR leaders, roughly eight in ten executives said accepting a counteroffer visibly damages an employee's standing with the leadership and board of the company they were prepared to leave. Separate market research puts the share of accepted offers that later fall through anywhere between a third and half, depending on the year and the labour market — a pattern that holds because a counteroffer typically fixes the symptom, not the reason the candidate began looking in the first place.

Family-owned Mittelstand businesses add a further layer. Where the departing executive has built long personal relationships with an owner-family, the retention conversation is rarely just financial — it draws on loyalty and continuity in ways a standard counteroffer analysis does not capture. A search process that has not accounted for this from the outset is exposed precisely at the moment it looks finished.

What a Properly Run Search Does Differently

• Tests counteroffer resilience during the process, not after signature — asking directly what the candidate expects their current employer to offer, and how they intend to respond.
• Keeps the mandate confidential until there is real mutual interest, protecting both the hiring company's market position and the candidate's standing with their current employer.
• Builds the offer's non-financial case as carefully as the financial one — the reasons the new role solves what the current one does not.
• Maintains contact through the notice period rather than treating a signed contract as the end of the engagement.
• Understands the ownership structure — family, private equity, or listed — and adjusts the retention conversation accordingly.

The Practical Takeaway

DACH's leadership market will keep contradicting its own headlines: broad contraction, acute scarcity at the top, both at once. The firms that place leadership well in this environment are not the ones with the largest database — they are the ones who understand why fewer people want the chair, who protect the mandate's confidentiality as carefully as the client's commercial position, and who treat the weeks after a signed offer as the most important part of the search rather than its conclusion.

Jenova Partners works across Germany, Austria and Switzerland on exactly this profile — industrial and technical leadership where the willing leader, not merely the capable technician, is the scarce resource. If your board is facing a chair nobody wants to sit, it is worth a conversation before the process starts rather than after it stalls.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (IW), leadership-occupation vacancy analysis, 2025–26.
2. Kienbaum Consultants International, professional search practice commentary, Düsseldorf.
3. Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI), industrial output outlook, Hannover Messe, April 2026.
4. Harvard Business Review, "If You're About to Take a New Job, Should You Consider Your Boss's Counteroffer?"
5. Gartner research on offer-acceptance and reneging trends, as cited in HBR and market press.
6. Public reporting on Basel life-sciences and Swiss executive-market hiring dynamics.

Jenova Partners Limited is a private limited company registered in England and Wales (Company No. 17240640), with its registered office at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX.

Disclaimer: Jenova Partners Limited is a private limited company registered in England and Wales (Company No. 17240640), with its registered office at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX. This article is intended for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice.