Dealroom tracks more than 14,000 wellness and beauty companies in Europe alone, more than 16,000 travel and hospitality businesses, and tens of thousands more in food, fashion, and consumer marketplace categories. The fastest-growing among them are not struggling to find a Chief People Officer. They are struggling to write a brief that describes the role the business actually needs, rather than the role the founders wish they were hiring for. The consequence is a hire that performs well for six months, fails in the second year, and leaves the company reopening the same search with a shorter runway and a more complicated internal landscape.

We have partnered with European consumer scale-ups on Chief People Officer searches across travel tech, consumer health, refurbished goods marketplaces, consumer gaming, and consumer education platforms. Across those searches, and across a talent pool of more than 6,500 people leaders assessed for senior HR searches in Europe, a single pattern appears with near-perfect consistency. The brief describes a fast-growing tech company's people function: culture building, talent acquisition for engineers and product managers, OKR design, performance management for a knowledge workforce. The company that exists when the Chief People Officer joins is something different. It has a core of 200 to 500 knowledge workers surrounded by a much larger population of customer service agents, operations staff, drivers, hosts, care workers, or warehouse employees who account for between 60 and 80% of total headcount. Those two populations require fundamentally different HR approaches. Most consumer Chief People Officer briefs do not acknowledge the second population at all.

This is not a talent shortage problem. The Talent Strategy Group's 2025 CHRO Trends Report found that CHRO and Chief People Officer turnover rose 36% year on year in 2024, with internal succession declining from 73% to 53% of appointments. When a CEO transition occurred, CHRO and Chief People Officer change followed in 52% of cases. European consumer scale-ups are not struggling to find people leaders. They are struggling to retain them, and the structural mismatch between what the brief described and what the role requires is a primary driver of that failure rate.

Why the Brief Describes a Tech Company

The Chief People Officer brief in European consumer scale-ups gets written by founders who have lived inside the knowledge worker population and have never had to manage the other one.

Consumer scale-up founders are typically former product managers, engineers, or marketers. They think about the people function in terms of what they needed when they were growing their technical teams: structured interviewing, L&D investment, equity participation, OKR design, manager development programmes, and a culture that can survive rapid headcount growth without losing the qualities that made the company interesting in the first place. These are legitimate priorities. They are also priorities that describe a minority of the total workforce in most European consumer scale-ups at Series C and beyond.

A European vacation rental marketplace at Series D has a product and engineering team of perhaps 300 people and a customer operations function spanning eight European countries with 800 agents handling guest inquiries, host disputes, and platform complaints. A European consumer health platform has a product team building the digital experience and a clinical and coaching workforce providing the actual service. A consumer gaming business has a tech team and a commercial team managing thousands of retail locations across Central and Eastern Europe. The consumer Chief People Officer who joins expecting to build a knowledge worker people function discovers the second population in the first month and typically does not have the tools, the instinct, or the management experience to lead it.

"The brief described a culture and talent leader for a tech company," one Chief People Officer told us after their first year at a European consumer marketplace. "What I found was that 70% of my workforce had no equity, no career path, a 40% annual turnover rate, and was spread across nine countries with nine different employment law regimes. My toolkit was the wrong toolkit for that population entirely."

The brief does not describe this population because the founder does not interact with it directly. The customer service team is managed by an operations director. The warehouse staff report into logistics. The drivers are often contractor-classified and sit outside the HR function entirely. The consumer Chief People Officer brief is written around the people the CEO sees at all-hands and one-on-ones. The people who actually deliver the consumer product are invisible in the job description.

For context on how the same brief-to-reality gap shapes commercial leadership searches at European consumer companies, our analysis of why European consumer scale-ups keep hiring CMOs whose instincts are built for acquisition rather than the full commercial lifecycle maps the structural parallel across the marketing function.

The Multi-Country Labor Law Dimension

The bifurcated workforce is the structural problem. The multi-country labor law regime is the operational one. Most consumer Chief People Officer briefs name neither.

A European consumer scale-up operating across 10 European countries is not operating one HR function in 10 locations. It is operating 10 separate HR functions that share a brand and a reporting line but differ in employment law, collective bargaining requirements, mandatory benefits, termination procedures, works council obligations, and data privacy rules in ways that make every significant people decision a multi-jurisdictional legal exercise. Under several European employment regimes, failure to consult a works council before restructuring is not a civil matter. It is a criminal one. The consumer Chief People Officer who has operated a single-jurisdiction HR function, even a large and sophisticated one, does not have the instinct for this environment built in.

The EU's Platform Work Directive, adopted in 2024, added a further layer of complexity for consumer scale-ups relying on contractor-classified workers in delivery, mobility, and services categories. The Directive creates a rebuttable presumption of employment for platform workers, shifting the burden of proof to the platform to demonstrate that the contractor relationship is genuinely independent. For a European food delivery platform or a gig economy consumer services company, this is not a compliance policy question. It is a fundamental workforce architecture question that the Chief People Officer owns from day one and that requires a specific combination of employment law fluency and workforce design experience to navigate without destroying the unit economics of the business model.

Candidates from pure technology environments, where the workforce is salaried, single-jurisdiction, and classified consistently, encounter this environment without the diagnostic framework to understand it. The first sign is typically a restructuring that goes wrong, a works council consultation that was not initiated, or a contractor reclassification that was handled as an HR administrative matter rather than a structural business decision.

The Candidate Profile

The European consumer scale-up Chief People Officer candidates who succeed share hard requirements the brief consistently fails to name.

Non-negotiables for a consumer Chief People Officer

First: demonstrated accountability for a bifurcated workforce where knowledge workers and operational or frontline workers coexist under the same HR function. This means having personally designed, implemented, and measured HR systems that work for both populations simultaneously, not managing one and delegating the other to an operations director who is not in the HR reporting line. The candidates who have built this understand instinctively that a single performance management framework, a single L&D strategy, and a single compensation architecture will not serve both populations. They describe their approach to each segment in different language, with different metrics, and with explicit acknowledgment of where the tools differ.

Second: multi-country European labor law navigation at operational depth. Not familiarity with the existence of works councils. Not having approved HR decisions in multiple markets. Having personally led a restructuring, a TUPE transfer, or a contractor reclassification process across two or more European jurisdictions with full accountability for the outcome. The consumer scale-up Chief People Officer who has been in that room with a works council representative and a local employment lawyer, in a language that is not English, has a qualitatively different operating profile from one who has managed the process at arm's length through a local HR manager.

Third: experience building the Chief People Officer function from an early-stage foundation through hypergrowth, not joining a scaled, stable people function and optimising it. The consumer scale-up that opens a Chief People Officer search at Series C typically has an HR function that consists of a recruitment lead, a handful of HRBPs, and a series of processes that were designed for 100 people and have not been redesigned since. The consumer Chief People Officer who joins needs to redesign the architecture while the business is still growing. The candidate who has only optimised mature people functions will try to stabilise before redesigning and will lose 12 months to a process that cannot be stabilised before it is redesigned.

What separates the good from the great

The strongest European consumer scale-up Chief People Officer candidates hold the operational workforce and the knowledge worker workforce as two explicit design problems that inform each other. The best candidate we assessed for a consumer health platform search described her approach this way: the clinical workforce tells you what your culture needs to stand for, because they are the ones delivering the product to the customer. The tech team tells you what your culture needs to feel like, because they are the ones who can leave the fastest. The consumer Chief People Officer who only designs for the tech team is optimising for retention of people who have options. She is ignoring the workforce that determines whether the product works.

That reframe, from HR as a function that serves the visible knowledge workforce to HR as a function that designs for both the technical core and the operational body simultaneously, is the differentiator that predicts performance in this environment. It is not a philosophy. It is a concrete set of capability choices: different compensation architectures, different feedback and performance systems, different onboarding programmes, different retention metrics, and a completely different view of what management development means for a team leader managing 40 customer service agents across two European markets versus a team lead managing six engineers.

"The consumer scale-ups I've seen get this right didn't have the best HR systems," a senior people leader who had held Chief People Officer roles at two European consumer platforms told us during a search. "They had a CPO who could describe the churn rate and the productivity per head for their ops workforce with the same fluency they described equity cliff schedules for their engineers. That data fluency across both populations is genuinely rare."

Our executive search practice for people and HR leadership across European consumer and high-growth businesses is structured around this specific capability combination, because it does not appear in standard Chief People Officer shortlists built from knowledge worker HR experience alone.

Red flags

Candidates whose entire Chief People Officer career sits within pure SaaS, fintech, or enterprise software companies present a specific risk that the brief never names. The instinct built in those environments, that culture is the primary lever, that L&D investment drives retention, that performance management frameworks should be sophisticated and multidimensional, is the right instinct for a knowledge worker environment. It is the wrong default mode for a consumer scale-up where the majority of the workforce has a different relationship with the employer entirely. The Chief People Officer who describes their first priority as "building a great culture" in a company where 65% of the workforce is on shift-based contracts across nine countries has misread the brief, and it will show in their prioritisation decisions from month two onward.

Candidates who cannot describe the EU Platform Work Directive and its implications for their previous employer's workforce architecture are missing a regulatory shift that will define Chief People Officer decisions at European consumer platforms for the next five years. This is not a legal question. It is a workforce design question, and the Chief People Officer who is still treating it as a compliance issue to be managed by legal has not thought about it at the right level.

Where the Talent Is

The qualified pool for European consumer scale-up Chief People Officer searches is distributed across several feeder sectors, none of which appear on standard shortlists constructed from tech company HR backgrounds.

The most productive feeder is European hospitality and retail at scale. Companies including IKEA's European operations, Inditex's HR function, Accor's regional people leadership, and the Hilton European expansion teams have produced Chief People Officer and CHRO-calibre people leaders who have managed genuinely bifurcated workforces, multi-country labor regimes, and operational workforce design challenges at a scale that no consumer scale-up has yet reached. These candidates are not typically found in tech company HR searches because the hospitality and retail background reads as the wrong sector. The operational instinct is directly transferable, and the knowledge worker component can be learned faster than the operational component.

The second pool is European consumer scale-ups that have already completed the bifurcated workforce transition. Companies including Flix, which built HR across 27 countries and 5,000 employees spanning both a technical team and a large operations workforce across drivers, station staff, and service teams; FREENOW, which designed a multi-market HR operating model across 11 countries simultaneously; and Delivery Hero's European HR leadership alumni carry the exact capability profile the role requires. These candidates have been through the transition that the hiring company is about to enter and can describe what it looks like from the inside.

Healthcare platforms with mixed clinical and technical workforces provide a third pool. Companies including kenbi, Docplanner, and Helios Digital Health have HR leaders who have managed the exact combination of knowledge workers and front-line service workers, often in multi-country environments, that defines the challenge at a consumer scale-up. The domain knowledge translation is straightforward. The workforce management instinct is directly applicable.

"The candidates who performed best in our search came from hospitality and from a food delivery platform that had gone through a major restructuring," one CEO of a European consumer travel marketplace told us. "They understood that 'people strategy' meant something completely different for an airport transfer driver in Spain than for a product manager in Munich. The SaaS Chief People Officer candidates could not hold those two populations simultaneously."

Why your Consumer Chief People Officer Search Keeps Failing

The brief is written for a company that does not exist yet.

Most European consumer scale-up Chief People Officer briefs describe the people function the founder wants to build: a world-class talent acquisition engine, a culture that attracts the best engineers in Europe, a performance framework that makes everyone feel seen and developed. This is a description of the people function the company will need if it eventually sheds its operational workforce and becomes a platform business. It is not a description of the people function the company needs in the next 24 months, when it will be managing rapid headcount growth across two different workforce populations in a multi-country environment where compliance failures carry legal consequences.

What works: before writing the brief, the CEO maps the total workforce by segment, by country, and by employment type. If more than 30% of the workforce sits outside the knowledge worker population, the brief needs to reflect that. The consumer Chief People Officer search that opens with an explicit description of the operational workforce, the multi-country compliance posture, and the workforce architecture challenge will produce a different shortlist from one that describes culture and talent acquisition for a tech company.

The interview process tests for the wrong half of the role.

Standard Chief People Officer interview processes at European consumer scale-ups assess culture design, talent acquisition strategy, organisational design for a growing tech team, and executive stakeholder management. These are reasonable assessments of the knowledge worker HR function. They are not assessments of the operational workforce management, multi-country compliance, and workforce architecture capabilities that the role also requires. The candidates who perform best in this process are those with the strongest knowledge worker HR backgrounds. The candidates who would perform best in the role are those who have managed both populations.

What works: add one scenario to the interview process that is explicitly about the operational workforce. Describe the company's frontline workforce in a specific country, name the employment regime, and ask the candidate what the first 90 days of their people strategy looks like for that population. Strong candidates with bifurcated workforce experience answer this with specificity about the compliance posture, the retention levers, and the management development agenda for that workforce segment. Candidates without it describe a culture and engagement programme that applies to the knowledge worker population.

Compensation undervalues the complexity.

A consumer scale-up Chief People Officer who is managing a bifurcated workforce across 10 European jurisdictions, navigating the EU Platform Work Directive, designing separate people architectures for two fundamentally different workforce populations, and advising the board on workforce restructuring decisions that carry legal consequences across multiple countries is operating at a complexity level that standard Chief People Officer compensation frameworks for tech companies do not capture. Companies that benchmark against pure SaaS or fintech Chief People Officer packages lose the candidates with operational workforce experience to the retail, hospitality, and logistics companies that have always priced this complexity correctly.

Compensation

Based on live searches and candidate conversations across Chief People Officer European consumer scale-up searches including Holidu, Flo Health, Refurbed, Preply, and Superbet, cross-referenced with senior people leadership compensation data across the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Central and Eastern Europe, the current market range looks like this.

Base salary runs between €140,000 and €205,000 depending on company stage, total workforce size, geographic complexity, and the scope of the operational workforce within the consumer scale-up Chief People Officer's accountability. London and Amsterdam sit at the upper end. Berlin and Munich run somewhat below. Warsaw, Bucharest, and Lisbon, where several European consumer scale-ups have significant operations workforce concentrations, sit meaningfully below the Western European range, though the best candidates in those markets benchmark against the Western European rate for the complexity of the role.

Variable pay runs between 15 and 25% of base. The strongest structures tie variable to both knowledge worker retention metrics (voluntary attrition in the tech team, time-to-hire for critical roles) and operational workforce metrics (attrition rate in the ops population, compliance audit outcomes, works council relationship scores). A consumer Chief People Officer who reduces voluntary attrition in the engineering team while also reducing the 35% annual turnover rate in the customer service function has created measurable business value that the variable structure should reflect across both dimensions.

Equity is increasingly common at Series C and beyond, particularly where the consumer Chief People Officer is being brought in to build the people function from an early-stage foundation. Total OTE for a consumer Chief People Officer at a company with €30 million to €150 million total funding typically runs between €170,000 and €255,000, excluding equity.

The Question Worth Asking Before the Search Opens

Ask the CEO one question before writing the brief: describe every population of people in this company who will report into the Chief People Officer's function, including the ones who are not currently in a formal HR reporting line.

If the answer includes customer service agents in multiple countries, contractor-classified workers, shift-based operational staff, or clinical and care workers, the brief needs to describe those populations explicitly. The Chief People Officer who joins a European consumer scale-up without knowing that two-thirds of the workforce is operational, multi-country, and outside the knowledge worker HR model will discover it on day 30. The company that writes the brief for the knowledge worker population they are comfortable describing and ignores the operational population they are not comfortable admitting is doing the same thing — and they will reopen the search inside 18 months.

The Big Search partners with European consumer scale-ups on Chief People Officer and senior HR leadership searches. If you are opening a consumer Chief People Officer search and want to pressure-test the brief against the full workforce complexity your business actually carries, we can help you define the role around the operational reality, not the knowledge worker ideal.