A growth strategy is only credible if you have the people to deliver it
Last week, at the Irish Funds Annual Global Funds Conference, Central Bank Governor Gabriel Makhlouf made a point worth considering well beyond the conference room:
“Capital goes where the opportunity is, and it stays where it is trusted.”
His speech on 1 October explored opportunities in technology and wider investor participation, alongside the importance of operational resilience, governance and effective oversight.
From a recruitment perspective, that raises a practical question for Irish financial-services businesses:
Do you have the people in place to take advantage of those opportunities and deliver on the commitments that come with them?
A strategy might involve expanding your product range, entering new markets, building distribution or taking on more complex business.
Each ambition creates demands on the organisation. Someone has to win the business. Someone has to make it work. And someone has to understand the risks well enough to challenge the approach and help find a workable solution.
Start with the business outcome
When discussing a hire, it is easy to start with a title.
“We need a Head of Distribution.”
“We need a more commercial COO.”
“We need someone senior in compliance.”
Those may be the right appointments. But the title alone tells you relatively little about what the person must achieve.
At Dolmen, the more useful starting point is: what does the business need to deliver, and what is preventing it from doing so today?
Is the challenge opening doors in a new market? Converting relationships into revenue? Supporting a more complex product? Improving an operating model? Giving the Irish business stronger decision-making capability?
Until those questions are clear, you risk recruiting an impressive person against an incomplete brief.
Growth needs capability across the business
Consider a firm planning to launch a product and build distribution in a new market.
Leadership needs to turn that ambition into priorities, allocate resources and make decisions when commercial objectives compete with operational realities.
Distribution needs more than a good network. It needs people who understand the proposition, the intended clients and the route to market, and who can turn interest into sustainable relationships.
Operations needs to establish how the business will deliver what has been promised: onboarding, processes, systems, service-provider capacity and the handling of exceptions.
Oversight needs people who can assess performance, recognise emerging issues and obtain meaningful answers from delegates and providers.
Compliance and risk need sufficient understanding of the business to identify constraints early, explain their significance and help evaluate viable options.
These capabilities are connected. A strong appointment in one area cannot automatically compensate for gaps elsewhere.
The salesperson may open the door, but the wider organisation has to be ready to walk through it.
Commercial judgement belongs across the team
Being commercially minded means understanding how the business succeeds, what clients need and the consequences of the decisions being made.
That matters in operations, oversight, compliance and risk just as much as it does in distribution.
You want people who can explain a problem clearly, ask useful questions and work through the options.
People who can say:
“This approach creates a risk we cannot accept. Here is another way we could achieve the objective.”
Sometimes the appropriate answer will be no. Sound judgement includes recognising when an opportunity should be declined.
The value lies in understanding the objective well enough to distinguish an avoidable obstacle from a necessary boundary.
Look for evidence of problem-solving
“Commercial” and “solutions-focused” appear in plenty of job descriptions. Interviews need to establish what those words mean in practice.
Ask candidates:
Tell me about a commercial objective you helped deliver. What was your contribution?
When did you identify a problem early enough to change the outcome?
Describe a disagreement between functions. How did you work through it?
When did you challenge an opportunity the business wanted to pursue?
What did you improve, and how did you know it worked?
Listen for ownership, judgement and specific outcomes. Also listen for how they describe colleagues. Solving a difficult problem usually requires cooperation across the business.
Give people the conditions to succeed
The Governor also emphasised that credible delegation requires genuine decision-making capacity and senior management with the expertise and authority to challenge delegates.
That has a wider hiring implication.
If you recruit someone to strengthen capability, will they have the authority, access and support to use it?
A capable hire can still struggle where responsibilities are unclear, decisions are repeatedly deferred or constructive challenge creates tension.
For hiring managers, HR and talent acquisition, the brief should therefore cover both the person and the environment in which they will work.
Before deciding which titles to add to the organisation chart, establish what the business needs to achieve, which capabilities are missing and how those people will work together.
Looking at your growth plans, where is the greatest gap between what you want to achieve and the capability you currently have to deliver it?
Hugh Murray | Dolmen Recruitment
Source: Governor Gabriel Makhlouf, “Opportunity and trust: Europe’s capital market and the Irish funds sector”, Irish Funds Annual Global Funds Conference, 1 October 2026.