Interim Marketing Leadership While You Search: Who Keeps the Team Moving

Last updated: October 28, 2026

An interim marketing leader should keep campaigns shipping, keep the team steady, and make the decisions that can’t wait, then hand the seat to the permanent hire. Repositioning and budget shifts belong to the permanent leader. In my recent searches, a new role often closes in 2 to 3 weeks, and one that already failed internally takes 1 to 2 months. As of October 2026, KORE1 contractors start a median 3 days after an offer (n=1,997 offer-to-start records, all roles).

By Samantha Litman, Executive Search, Marketing, Creative & Media, KORE1

Your VP of marketing gave notice on Friday. Now it’s Saturday and you’re staring at the ceiling.

Who runs Monday’s meeting?

That question reaches me from CEOs and founders more often than you’d guess, usually a few hours after the resignation email, and it almost always comes with a second one. Do we promote somebody, bring somebody in, or just wait it out? Nobody’s sure. Everybody has an opinion.

My answer is to cover the seat on purpose, with an interim head of marketing, while the real search runs at full speed. I recruit marketing, creative, and media leaders through KORE1’s marketing recruiters team, and KORE1 places interim leaders too, so I make my living on both halves of that answer. I’ll tell you where I’d skip each one.

What Should an Interim Marketing Leader Own, and What Should Wait?

Think of the job as three verbs. Keep things shipping. Keep people steady. Decide what can’t wait.

That’s the whole list. Everything else belongs to somebody who hasn’t been hired yet.

The temptation runs the other way, and I understand it. A sharp interim walks in, sees a brand architecture nobody loves or a budget that’s pointed the wrong direction for a year, and wants to fix it before lunch. They’re good at their jobs. But if they reposition the brand in week three, they’ve written the new leader’s first ninety days before that leader has even interviewed, and the strong finalists can tell. People good enough to run your marketing want to build something. They don’t want to inherit a finished argument.

So here’s one way to split the calls. Yours will move a few rows up or down, depending on how much your CEO wants to stay in the weeds.

The agency row is where most mandates come apart, so write it down on one page, covering what the interim owns, what comes to you, what waits, and the date it all ends, and then hand a copy to every agency lead on day one.

Who fills the seat? An interim head of marketing should be someone senior enough to be listened to and calm enough not to need the attention. Sometimes the better cover is an interim marketing manager, one level down, especially when the team is strong and the gap is mostly decisions about people. I wouldn’t do that for a team of fifteen with five agencies. For a team of four, it can work fine. KORE1’s interim management services page explains how these engagements get scoped, if you want to see what the full-time version looks like first.

How Long Will the Search Take?

Here’s what I see. A new role, with a hiring manager who answers emails and makes decisions, can close in two to three weeks. That’s my read of my own searches, not a KORE1 benchmark. A role that has been open a while, or one that already failed inside the company, takes longer. One to two months.

Why longer? Because a failed search leaves a trail. The strong people in your market have already seen the posting and passed, the job description has been rewritten twice and nobody remembers why, and every extra week the seat sits open makes the next candidate wonder what’s wrong with it. If the search you’re running is the full-time one, our CMO executive search practice handles it, and the same pattern holds.

Is that slow? SHRM’s 2025 recruiting benchmarking put median time-to-fill at roughly a month and a half for both executive and nonexecutive roles, counted from the requisition to the accepted offer, according to SHRM’s summary of the 2025 data. My searches land in the same neighborhood.

Now the part people forget. Time-to-fill stops at the accepted offer. Your interim doesn’t. The new leader owes their current employer notice, then needs a few weeks to find their footing, and you’d like some overlap so the handoff happens between two people instead of through a document. Add that up and the interim runs longer than the search did.

A median of 116 days is about 17 weeks, so an interim stay of a few months sits in the middle of normal contract work. Plan for that, then add a cushion.

There’s some academic work on all this, though not much. A 2020 paper in the Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics by Tom Sechrest, who served as an interim executive himself, notes that interim leaders serve for short periods but often play a key role in making leadership transitions work. It’s a reflection and a short literature review, not a big dataset, and it says outright that more research is needed. Matches what I see. Everybody has opinions about interims. Hardly anyone has data.

How Do You Keep the Interim From Becoming the Default Hire?

Picture week six. Sound familiar?

The interim is doing great, the team likes them, you’ve stopped checking your phone at night, and meanwhile the search has slipped a week and then another, because why rush when everything is going fine? Nobody decided to stop looking. It just quit being urgent. That’s how it happens. A seat meant to be temporary turns into a hire nobody interviewed against anyone.

The warning sign is one sentence. “Honestly, they’re doing great, so there’s no rush.” If you hear it from your own mouth, that’s the one.

A few things keep it from happening.

• Put the search kickoff on the calendar before the interim starts, not after they’ve settled in.
• Write an end date into the mandate. A date, not “until we find someone.”
• Ask for a handoff document in the first month, a map of what’s there. Not a plan for the department, because that’s the next leader’s to write.
• A fifteen-minute search check with the CEO every week, even when the news is that nothing happened.
• Decide whether the interim is a candidate, and tell them. More on that next.

Should the Interim Be a Candidate for the Permanent Role?

Sometimes. But decide before they start, not after they’ve done a great job and everyone’s attached. Attachment clouds judgment.

If you’d hire them from a cold start, say so, and run them through the same scorecard, the same panel, and the same questions as everyone else, so the decision at the end can be defended to the team, to the board, and to the interim themselves. If you wouldn’t, say that too, kindly, on day one. The worst version is the quiet maybe. The interim senses a possibility, starts working like a candidate, and gets a no in month four. Nobody enjoys that conversation. It hurts them and it unsettles the team.

Here’s the trade you’re weighing. Devin Hornick, a Partner at KORE1, describes contract coverage as quick and flexible, then sums up the other side this way. “The benefit of hiring full time is quite the opposite. It’s really not super flexible, but you have stability… legacy knowledge.” Stability and legacy knowledge are what the permanent hire is for. An interim, by design, gives you neither on day one.

And the best person in the building isn’t always the right person for the next three years. The strongest candidate on paper isn’t always the strongest hire, and the person who has run the seat for three months isn’t automatically the answer either. They might be. I’ve just learned not to assume.

If it turns out you want to keep a contractor, KORE1 contractors can join your payroll at no fee after 1,040 hours, which is about 26 weeks of full-time work. KORE1 has 552 contract-to-hire placements in its records, so that path is well worn.

What Should Change in the Job Description Before You Search?

I always say the job description is the blueprint, not the finished house. A failed internal search is usually a blueprint problem, not a candidate problem.

Your interim is a gift here, because after three weeks inside the seat they know what the job actually is, which is rarely what the old posting said and almost never what the team wishes it had said. Clients ask me, “Do I need to change the job description, or change what I’m looking for?” Sit down with the interim and the team and ask these.

• Which parts of this job did the last person do that nobody ever wrote down?
• Which parts of the posting did nobody actually do?
• What did the team need from its leader and not get?
• Is the level still right? Maybe the work grew into a VP seat, or shrank into a head-of seat, and the title candidates see tells them which one you meant.
• Which must-have is really a preference? Industry experience is the usual suspect.

One caution. Don’t let the interim write the job around themselves. Really. They’ll do it without meaning to, because they know their own strengths best. Use what they’ve learned, then let someone else hold the pen. If the seat has already stalled once, why you can’t find the right candidate walks through where searches usually go wrong, and the blueprint, not the finished house goes deeper on rewriting the brief.

If You Find Someone Great, How Fast Should You Move?

Faster than feels comfortable.

If you find someone great, move. Good people have options. They always do. In my searches, finding strong marketing leaders isn’t the hard part. The hard part is finding the ones ready to leave a job that’s working, so when one agrees to a real conversation, treat that as rare. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of advertising, promotions, and marketing managers to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations. You are not the only company looking for this person.

The interim buys you something here that people miss. You’re not hiring from fear. Nobody is begging you to fill the seat by Friday, so you can say yes to the right person quickly and no to the wrong one without flinching.

Speed takes setup. Before the first interview, decide who signs the offer, get the pay range approved, and put holds on three calendars for final rounds, so a good candidate isn’t waiting nine days for a panel to find a free Tuesday. And don’t wait to see “just one more” unless the slate truly has a gap, because the one you’re waiting on is usually the one who took another offer.

Questions CEOs Ask When the Seat Goes Empty

Is an interim just a contractor with a bigger title?

Not quite. An interim is defined by the seat, a full-time leader running the function until the permanent hire starts, while contract is the engagement model, hours bought against defined work.

Most interims are engaged on a contract, which is why people blur the two. If you’re still choosing, contract, interim or fractional lays out the three models side by side.

Can the interim run the agencies, or only the team?

The day-to-day, yes, inside limits you set. They can run status calls, approve work in flight, and keep invoices moving. New agency contracts, scope changes, and firings should wait or come to you for sign-off.

Tell the agencies in writing who’s covering and who approves spend. They stall without a name.

Can I really have someone in the seat next week?

Sometimes. KORE1 contractors start a median 3 days after an offer (n=1,997 offer-to-start records, hires 2019 to 2026, all roles), so the offer is the slow part and the start is not.

That’s every role KORE1 staffs, not a marketing number. For a leadership seat I wouldn’t promise a date until I’ve heard what the seat actually needs, because the person who can run Monday’s meeting well and the person who can rebuild the whole calendar are two different searches, and they rarely turn up in the same week.

So how long does it take to hire a marketing director?

In my recent searches, a new role with a responsive hiring manager often closes in 2 to 3 weeks, and one that already failed internally takes 1 to 2 months.

Roughly a month and a half is where SHRM’s 2025 median landed, counted to the accepted offer. Then add the new hire’s notice. Add whatever overlap you can get, too. The interim stays until the new leader is really in the chair, and that’s the number your plan needs. These are my searches, not a KORE1 benchmark.

Can someone on my team step up instead?

Someone on your team can cover for a few weeks, and it’s a decent way to watch them lead. After that it gets expensive, because they’re doing two jobs and neither one gets their best attention.

If you do it, call it “acting,” set a real end date, take something real off their plate, and tell them straight whether they’re a candidate, because a person covering two jobs while quietly auditioning for a third is carrying more than anyone has acknowledged.

What Does the Seat Look Like Right Now?

If the seat is empty, or about to be, I’d love to talk it through. Tell me the role, the date the seat opens, where the search stands, and whether the team is onsite or remote. I’ll tell you what I’d do, and what I’d skip. No pressure.

Let’s talk about covering the seat. If you already know you want a full-time leader running the function until the permanent hire starts, interim marketing director services is the page for that. I’m on LinkedIn too. So, who’s running Monday’s meeting?