A resume will tell you where someone has been. It will not tell you how they made a room feel when they walked into it.
That distinction carries more weight in luxury fashion, beauty, and lifestyle than almost anywhere else. The appointments Lerryn House works on are rarely decided on competence alone. By the time a candidate is being considered for a role at a house with a defined point of view, that much is assumed. What remains to be discovered is something closer to instinct: how a person reads a room, how they carry themselves in a way that reflects the brand without being told to, whether they understand that restraint is often the more sophisticated choice.
None of this appears on paper. A resume can list the brands someone has worked for, the teams they have managed, the revenue they have moved. It cannot say whether a client meeting called for fewer words rather than more, and whether they sensed that without being told. It cannot say whether their judgement, under pressure, runs toward theatre or toward calm.
This is the part of an appointment that takes the longest to get right, and the part most often skipped. A faster process favours the documentable: years of experience, title progression, a familiar list of names. A slower one makes room for the qualities that genuinely determine whether someone will thrive inside a particular house, and those qualities tend to reveal themselves only in conversation, over time, and usually more than once.
Tom has spent a career watching this play out from inside the process, first as a recruiter learning the difference between a candidate who interviews well and one who would actually serve a brand well, and later as someone whose judgement on this was simply trusted. The lesson has held steady: the candidates who go on to do the role well are rarely the ones who performed best in a single hour-long conversation. They are the ones whose sense of judgement became apparent more gradually, often in the parts of a conversation that had nothing to do with the job itself.
This is, in part, why so many appointments disappoint within the first year, not because the person was unqualified, but because the qualities that actually mattered were never tested for. A process built for speed has little room to look past the documentable, and the gap shows up later: in someone who performs competently but never quite reads the room the way the brand needs them to, who manages the work well but misjudges, again and again, what the house is meant to feel like to the people standing in front of it. The cost of that mismatch rarely appears on a balance sheet. It appears, instead, in the slow erosion of something harder to repair than a vacancy: the sense, among a team or a client, that the brand no longer quite sounds like itself.
None of this is a case against credentials. Experience matters, and a strong track record remains the starting point of any serious conversation. But for the brands Lerryn House works with, the houses where taste and discretion are part of the product itself, credentials have never reliably predicted who would thrive once appointed. The resume gets someone into the room. What happens after that is harder to write down.