90 days, dozens of interviews, billions on the line: Inside Blackstone’s CEO search process for its 250 companies

The CEO candidate seemed like a perfect fit. Blackstone, the private equity titan, had acquired a real estate company and was searching for the ideal leader to helm it. The candidate had excelled as a senior executive at another Blackstone-owned real estate company and had greatly impressed interviewers on the CEO search committee.

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But soon after he was hired to the new position, problems began to surface. The role required a chief executive who had a strong grasp of the local market, relationships with regional policymakers, and expertise in managing regulatory affairs—areas where his experience was limited. Within six months, it was clear that the CEO was struggling. The company had fallen significantly behind on its growth plan and failed to meet key financial milestones. Blackstone initially attempted to hire its way out of the problem, adding a chief transformation officer, an executive to restructure costs, and a more active advisory board chair. The CEO was also given feedback and coaching. But despite those efforts, his tenure lasted only two years.

“If we had simply stepped back and asked ourselves, ‘What do we uniquely need this CEO to do to get us where we need to be?’ we would have realized he wasn’t the right fit,” admits Courtney della Cava, Blackstone’s senior managing director and global head of portfolio talent and organizational performance. “Instead, we became enamored with his past success—and it set us back.”

It was a costly error, but one that Della Cava says highlights the importance of Blackstone’s current approach to hiring CEOs for the 250 companies in its portfolio.

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Blackstone has reached the top of the private equity pyramid by mastering the art of acquiring promising companies, improving their operations and profitability over a few years, then selling them at a higher value. It’s a strategy that has grown its portfolio of companies and real estate assets to a value of $1.1 trillion—a nearly 13- fold increase compared to the $88 billion in assets under management when it went public in 2007.

The success of this model hinges on having the right leaders in place. And Della Cava was hired in 2021 to transform the firm’s CEO recruitment from an art to a more precise science.

Landing a C-Suite role at a Blackstone portfolio company is exceptionally competitive, and most candidates won’t make the cut, says Dan Kaplan, a senior client partner at Korn Ferry’s CHRO practice. “Everyone wants to be there,” Kaplan says. “It has become a brand synonymous with being best in class.”

Under Della Cava, each aspiring company leader now undergoes a rigorous and time-consuming three- to four-month recruitment process that includes nearly a dozen interviews with Blackstone stakeholders, advisors, and consulting partners, as well as board presentations, third-party assessments, exhaustive feedback from references, and a nearly five-hour psychometric evaluation that’s designed to deeply probe the candidate’s cognitive ability, character, motivations, and essence as a leader.

Selecting a CEO is about betting on potential, and Della Cava has found that each component of Blackstone’s search process improves the likelihood of making the right appointment. This playbook, she says, is especially critical for a role that is grueling, fast-paced, and requires a person who can handle the volatility of being celebrated as a hero one day and criticized as a villain the next.

“Being a CEO is a high-intensity sport,” says Della Cava. “For the right person, it’s extraordinary. But it’s not for everyone.”

Blackstone’s CEO recruitment framework, which Della Cava and her team have refined over the past four years, has quickly become the envy of other private equity firms, according to several executive recruiters. Her 11-person team often works on dozens of companies’ leadership searches at once.

With billions of dollars at stake, the importance of selecting the right CEO for a Blackstone portfolio company is extraordinarily high—for not only a company’s financial success but also its culture. “An underperforming leader results in an underperforming company,” says Della Cava. Put simply, she says: “Leadership is the No. 1 driver of value creation.”

And getting a hire wrong can be a cascading disaster. Studies conducted by management consulting firm ghSMART found that a typical hiring mistake costs a company 15 times the employee’s base salary in hard costs and lost productivity. For example, a single error in hiring a $100,000 employee could result in losses exceeding $1.5 million. The stakes are even greater for executive roles.

Born and raised in San Diego and now living in San Francisco, Della Cava defies the stereotype of the laid-back, sun-chasing Californian. Impeccably dressed, well-groomed, and tall, she exudes a polished self-assuredness and sophistication reminiscent