What UK Boards Get Wrong About Their First Mexico Hire

Eight months into running a small Mexico City office, a general manager good enough to get the job in the first place had already asked twice about coming home early. His boss, the COO of a private equity group I was seeing in London a few weeks ago, wasn't sure if that was a him problem or a Mexico problem. Having spent 16 years as an expat myself, I actually had an answer for him, and the two parts don't weigh the same. 

Whether someone can build a real life somewhere is personal, and no hiring process fixes that, although good support is fundamental. Whether the company built the muscle to make good local leadership decisions from day one, instead of sending its best available person over and hoping, is not personal at all. That part is entirely fixable, and almost nobody fixes it in time.

It's not an unusual conversation anymore. Between the executive searches we run, the employer branding work we do, and the coaching we give executives who lead locally while reporting globally, often not Mexican themselves, I hear some version of it most months, and it's rarely about a shortage of good people. It's about companies that know exactly how to build something in the UK, assuming the same instincts carry over to Mexico. Mostly, they don't.

The Money Part Is Not the Hard Part Anymore

None of this is difficult to find if you go looking for it. UK companies put more capital into Mexico in the first quarter of 2026 than in almost all of the previous year combined, according to Mexico's Ministry of Economy, more than tripling the same period a year earlier to over US$741 million. IHG opened a new regional headquarters in Guadalajara this spring that will grow from 40 employees to 200 by December, on its way to becoming its fifth-largest market worldwide. Reckitt now runs a real slice of its Latin America support out of a hub in Mexico City. They just opened beautiful offices a few months back. Diageo has been quietly expanding production capacity here for the better part of a decade and is continuing to rethink its Mexico strategy. A London-based infrastructure investor has turned into one of the country's bigger renewable power players without much fanfare at all. None of that is new money discovering a new country. It's old money that finally has a reason to move faster; the UK's accession to the CPTPP took effect here in June.

Even companies that size, with real budget and years of runway here, don't have this fully solved. They're still wrestling with the same question everyone else is: who actually runs it, and whether that person has been given the real authority to do the job.

What the Best Candidates Are Actually Evaluating

Here's the part nobody tells UK boards before they open here: the executives worth hiring are not really weighing the job description. They're weighing whether the company is actually staying. Every nearshoring wave pulls the same handful of recruiters toward the same short list of bilingual, cross-border executives, German firms first, then American and Spanish ones, increasingly British ones now, and that short list has gotten very good at reading tells. A generic Country Manager title with no real functional authority behind it is one of those tells. So is a job description that reads like it was translated rather than written for Mexico, or a compensation structure copied from London instead of built for the market here. That signals the company is testing the water instead of actually committing, and the best candidates read it immediately. Some turn the job down outright. Others take it and leave within a year, and back in London that gets filed away as a bad hire rather than what it actually was, a company that never fully showed up.

That's what was actually happening with my client's general manager, more than either of us wanted to admit during lunch. Nobody at the head office had thought about what the role itself was signaling, whether the reporting structure and the investment behind the office read as a genuine long-term bet or a toe in the water. He'd taken the job in good faith. Eight months in, he wasn't sure the company had made the same bet he did.

There's a more practical reason the stakes are higher than they look, too. Mexico has no at-will employment. Undoing a bad senior hire isn't the quiet, fast decision it can be elsewhere: without documented just cause, the company owes severance under strict statutory requirements, on top of whatever the executive negotiated on the way in, and getting the process wrong can leave a company ordered to reinstate someone it never should have hired. Treating the first Mexico hire as reversible if it doesn't work out badly misjudges both what it costs and how long it takes to actually correct course.

What Boards Get Backwards

Mexico's unemployment rate is among the lowest in the OECD, and the executive layer is tighter still. Industry estimates put more than 7 in 10 senior searches here running longer than companies expect, and nearshoring keeps pulling German, American, and Spanish firms into the same short list of people with the right sector depth and cross-border credibility. Boards tend to blame that scarcity when a search goes badly. In my experience it's usually speed, not scarcity, that costs them the person they wanted. A UK process, committee reviews, a mobility firm running things from London, a job description written for a UK reader, takes months to get to an offer. The people worth hiring in Mexico are often gone in weeks, usually through someone who called them directly rather than through any formal process at all.

The last habit worth naming is hiring for comfort instead of authority: someone fluent in both languages and easy in both rooms, expected to smooth things over between London and Mexico City, without also making sure that same person holds real decision rights on the ground. Being easy in the room is necessary. It isn't sufficient on its own, and a workforce or a regulator generally knows within weeks whether real authority is sitting across the table from them or a few time zones away on a call.

The policy groundwork behind all of this took years: CPTPP ratification, embassy-level talks between London and Mexico City, an industrial strategy that names Mexico specifically. The window is real. Whether my client's general manager stays past his first year is still an open question as I write this, and I don't know the answer yet either. What I do know is which boards tend to still be standing here in three years. Rarely the ones who moved fastest or spent the most. Almost always it's the ones who got their first hires in Mexico right, and whose people never had to wonder whether the company actually meant it.

Kristien Turner is CEO and Founder of TK Talent Group, an executive search and employer brand firm supporting companies building leadership teams across the UK and Mexico.