Marketing Recruitment Agency

Senior marketing recruitment for UK businesses — CMOs, Marketing Directors, digital marketing leadership, and the brief-building work that determines whether the appointment succeeds

Exec Capital places senior marketing executives with UK businesses — from CMO and Marketing Director appointments at board and executive committee level to Head of Marketing, Head of Digital, and specialist marketing leadership roles where the hire will shape the function for years. We run marketing searches as retained executive search — with a defined brief, a mapped candidate market, and a shortlist process that assesses both commercial impact and cultural fit — rather than as a database search against a keyword. For our dedicated CMO recruitment service, see CMO recruitment. For interim marketing leadership, see Interim CMO. For the CMO job description guide, see CMO job description.

Marketing Roles Exec Capital Places

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). The most senior marketing appointment — sitting on the executive committee, reporting to the CEO, and accountable for the organisation’s marketing strategy, brand, and customer acquisition and retention agenda. The CMO search requires the most precise brief-building of any marketing hire: the mandate scope, the relationship between brand and performance marketing, the B2B or B2C context, and the CEO’s expectations for what marketing will deliver commercially all need to be resolved before the candidate market is approached. For full role detail, see our CMO job description guide.

Marketing Director. The Marketing Director leads the marketing function in businesses where the title reflects either the most senior marketing role in the organisation or the operational marketing leadership below a CMO. The distinction matters for the brief: a Marketing Director who is the most senior marketing executive in a £50m business carries a genuinely board-facing mandate; a Marketing Director in a £300m business who reports to a CMO carries a delivery mandate. Writing the brief accurately for each produces a very different candidate pool.

Head of Marketing. Head of Marketing appointments typically sit one level below the Marketing Director or CMO — leading the marketing team in day-to-day delivery of the marketing plan while the more senior leader focuses on strategy and stakeholder management. These roles are frequent in businesses that are building their marketing function for the first time or professionalising it after a period of under-investment, and the quality of this appointment determines whether the marketing function can operate effectively at the pace the business requires.

Digital Marketing Director and Head of Digital. The digital marketing leadership role — covering paid search, SEO, paid social, email, content, and the marketing technology stack that enables digital programmes — is one of the most actively recruited marketing functions in the UK market. The brief for these searches needs to address the balance between technical execution depth and leadership capability: the candidate who can manage a channel and the candidate who can lead a team managing multiple channels are not the same person, and the size and structure of the digital marketing function determines which profile is right.

Brand Director and Head of Brand. Brand leadership appointments — covering brand strategy, creative direction, visual identity, communications, and the management of the brand’s expression across all touchpoints — are distinct from performance marketing leadership and require a distinct candidate pool. The best brand leaders combine genuine creative judgement with the commercial rigour to connect brand investment to long-term revenue outcomes in terms a CFO will accept. Finding candidates who have both is what makes brand leadership searches genuinely challenging.

Demand Generation and Growth Marketing Leadership. Demand generation, growth marketing, and revenue marketing roles are the fastest-growing category in senior marketing recruitment — driven by the growing board-level expectation that marketing investment must be directly attributable to commercial pipeline. These roles require analytical depth, digital channel expertise, and the ability to build and manage the attribution frameworks that connect marketing activity to revenue outcomes. The candidate pool is narrower than for broader marketing director roles, and the brief needs to be specific about which channels, which attribution model, and what the commercial targets are.

Head of Content and Head of Product Marketing. Content leadership and product marketing leadership are specialist roles within the broader marketing function that require specific expertise — in editorial standards and content strategy for content leadership, in positioning, messaging, and market research for product marketing. Both are increasingly important in B2B technology and professional services businesses where thought leadership and category education are the primary marketing mechanisms.

What Makes Marketing Recruitment Different

The title inflation problem. Marketing carries more title inflation than any other function in the C-suite and senior leadership market. “Marketing Director” in one business means something completely different to “Marketing Director” in another — the title does not reliably indicate seniority, scope, team size, or budget authority in the way that “CFO” or “COO” broadly does. The first task in any marketing brief is to establish what the role actually involves — what the marketing leader will be accountable for, what team and budget they will manage, what the business expects them to deliver commercially — rather than starting from the title.

Agency vs in-house background. Many senior marketing candidates have backgrounds that span both agency-side and in-house marketing, and both routes produce strong marketing leaders — but with different default orientations. Agency-side candidates typically bring broader channel exposure and deeper creative and production expertise; in-house candidates typically bring stronger commercial accountability experience and closer integration with the sales and product functions. The right balance for a specific role depends on what the business is asking marketing to do and whether it is starting from a strong brand with weak commercial attribution or from strong commercial attribution with a weak brand.

Portfolio and track record assessment. Marketing is one of the few C-suite functions where candidates can demonstrate capability through tangible work — campaigns run, brands built or repositioned, growth driven through specific channels. The best marketing search processes include structured portfolio review alongside traditional interview — asking candidates to walk through specific pieces of work, explain the commercial brief they were working against, what decisions they made and why, and what the measurable outcome was. This reveals commercial rigour and creative judgement simultaneously in a way that competency-based interview alone does not.

The CMO tenure problem. The CMO has the shortest average tenure of any C-suite role — consistently under three years in most studies — and the primary cause is misalignment between what the board expected and what they recruited for. Businesses that run marketing searches correctly — with the brand-vs-revenue question answered honestly before the brief is written — make appointments that last. Businesses that rush the brief and hire to a generic job description frequently find themselves recruiting the same role again inside eighteen months. The brief-building work that Exec Capital does at the start of every marketing search is the most direct investment in the longevity of the appointment.

Who We Recruit For

Exec Capital places marketing leaders across a wide range of business types and sectors. In PE-backed businesses where the marketing function needs to support a defined value creation plan — brand development to support an exit story, demand generation to demonstrate revenue growth, or digital transformation of the marketing function — we build the brief around the investment thesis and the timeline. In founder-led businesses where marketing has historically been underfunded or informal, we place the marketing leader who can build the function from a low base while delivering the commercial programmes the business needs in the short term. In large corporate and listed businesses, we run CMO and Marketing Director searches that require the governance rigour and stakeholder management capability that board-facing marketing leadership demands.

Across sectors, we have placed marketing leaders in financial services, technology and SaaS, professional services, consumer and retail, healthcare, and industrial and manufacturing businesses — adapting the brief and the candidate profile to the specific marketing challenges of each sector rather than applying a generic marketing leader template.

The Brief-Building Question We Ask Every Client

Before Exec Capital approaches a single marketing candidate on any search, we work with the CEO and any relevant board members to answer the question the CMO job description guide sets out: is this primarily a revenue role or a brand role, and what does the business most need from marketing right now? The answer shapes everything — the candidate profile, the channels we search, the assessment criteria, and the way we position the role in the market.

The businesses that get the most from this process are those that are willing to be honest about the answer — including when the honest answer is that the business has historically under-invested in marketing and is asking the new marketing leader to correct that under-investment while simultaneously delivering commercial programmes with inadequate resource. That is a specific and demanding brief, and being clear about it at the start attracts candidates who can do it rather than candidates who will be surprised by it after they join.