UK companies are still failing to inject any innovation into the executive recruitment market and as a result are hiring the same “stale, pale males” as senior managers, new research reveals.

About half of the directors and senior HR professionals interviewed by interim management specialist Executives Online admitted that finding candidates with the right cultural fit dominated the recruitment process in the executive market, at the expense of capability and innovation.

The Executive Talent 2006 survey blamed a reluctance to change recruitment processes for the poor levels of diversity at the executive level - 81% of respondents claimed they had long-established recruitment agency or headhunter relationships which had not changed for many years.

About 60% of the 102 respondents feared that they could not find candidates with the appropriate experience, and a third said that the scarcity of executive talent was a problem.

More than a quarter said they could not find the people they required.

Cultural fit was deemed more important to small companies (66%) than to larger companies (39%), where the impact of new employees on a larger workforce was less pronounced.

On top of this, formal metrics are not widely implemented, with one in 10 survey respondents admitting that they do not measure their recruitment functions.

“While it is understandable that companies will want to recruit someone they can work with, this box-filling, play-it-safe approach, where the priority is finding 'a face that fits', means that many organisations are

not exploring the full breadth of senior management talent available to them and are suffering as a result,” said Norrie Johnston, managing director of Executives Online.