The Chief of Staff Role is having a moment
A decade ago, the title mostly showed up in government, the military, and a handful of large corporations. Now it’s turning up next to CEOs, COOs, division presidents, and other senior leaders across nearly every industry. According to LinkedIn Economic Graph research, Chief of Staff roles in the U.S. grew 60% between 2019 and 2024, compared with 21% growth for comparable positions. Globally, the number was 91%.
That’s not a company dressing up an old job with a new name. It’s a real shift in how organizations think about leadership capacity. So what’s driving it? And more importantly for employers: what does a Chief of Staff actually add, and when does it make sense to create the role?
What a Chief of Staff Actually Does
At its core, a Chief of Staff makes a senior executive more effective. Unlike a functional leader who owns one department, the Chief of Staff operates horizontally, moving across the organization wherever the executive’s priorities take them.
The role can include translating strategy into action, coordinating major initiatives, preparing an executive for high-stakes decisions, spotting organizational roadblocks, and keeping leadership priorities on track. Over time, a good Chief of Staff becomes a sounding board, a project driver, an information filter, and a connector between departments that don’t always talk to each other.
Most of the job comes down to three questions:
- What does the executive need to know?
- What needs to happen next?
- And who needs to make it happen?
That kind of role becomes essential once a company gets too complex for one person to keep every priority moving alone.
Is Chief of Staff Just an Executive Assistant Makeover?
The answer is an emphatic NO! There is a definite distinction between both roles and that difference can be enormously valuable to a leadership team.
An experienced Executive Assistant is frequently a trusted advisor, a gatekeeper, a communications partner, and one of the people who understands the business, the executive, and the surrounding team better than almost anyone else. That expertise is not administrative overhead. It’s institutional knowledge.
The Chief of Staff role, by contrast, tends to center on strategic initiatives, cross-functional execution, and organizational priorities across the business.
In practice, the two roles overlap constantly, and they work best as partners rather than substitutes. It’s also worth noting that an accomplished Executive Assistant whose responsibilities have already expanded into strategic or operational territory can be one of the strongest possible candidates for a Chief of Staff role. The two career paths aren’t separate tracks. They’re often the same track at different points.
Why the Role Is Growing Now
The timing isn’t an accident. Companies are managing more complexity, faster technology cycles, and more interconnected decisions than they used to. A single CEO might be navigating growth, AI adoption, talent, investors, and M&A all at once, often while trying to keep the organization lean. That combination creates a real problem: leadership needs more coordination and follow-through, but not necessarily another layer of traditional management. A Chief of Staff can fill that gap without adding organizational weight.The role also isn’t limited to CEOs anymore. It’s increasingly showing up alongside other C-suite executives and business-unit leaders, which reflects how widespread the need for cross-functional coordination has become.
Korn Ferry has reported that Chief of Staff job postings have doubled year over year, and that the number of executives holding the title has tripled since 2021.
So what started as a niche executive-support function has now become something closer to a business operations and leadership role.
The Real Value: Leverage
The most valuable thing a Chief of Staff brings usually isn’t a specific technical skill. It’s leverage.
A strong Chief of Staff frees an executive to focus on the decisions only they can make, by filtering information, tracking initiatives, flagging emerging issues, coordinating across departments, and making sure decisions actually turn into action.That’s especially valuable when a CEO has become a bottleneck, when a company is growing quickly, or when strategic priorities keep getting lost in day-to-day demands. It’s also useful during a transformation, a restructuring, an acquisition, or a founder’s shift from hands-on operator to organizational leader.
For employers, that’s the real business case. The question isn’t whether the title is trendy. It’s whether the organization has an executive capacity problem this role can actually solve.
Who’s Hiring, and Who’s Doing the Job
Chief of Staff hiring is growing across technology, healthcare, consumer services, and professional services, among other industries, and company size alone doesn’t determine whether the role makes sense.
At a startup, a Chief of Staff might help a founder scale past personally managing every important initiative. At a midsize company, a CEO may effectively be acting as chief salesperson, strategist, recruiter, and final decision-maker all at once, and a Chief of Staff can bring structure to that load. At a larger organization, the role may support a CEO, division president, or COO on strategic planning, transformation, or executive communications.
What determines whether the role makes sense isn’t headcount. It’s the complexity of the executive’s job. There’s also no single professional profile that defines a Chief of Staff, and there shouldn’t be. Chiefs of Staff come from consulting, operations, finance, project management, communications, technology, and plenty of other backgrounds. According to the Chief of Staff Network’s 2025 compensation research, average base salary sits at $167,954, up from $154,673 the year before, with nearly a quarter of respondents earning more than $200,000. Executive-level Chiefs of Staff averaged $194,000, entry-level roles averaged $91,000, and those with 20-plus years of experience averaged $260,000.
There’s no magic number of years that qualifies someone for the role. What matters is whether a candidate has the judgment, business understanding, and cross-functional experience the specific position requires.
The Best Candidate May Not Have the Title Yet
Because the Chief of Staff career path has developed so quickly, some of the strongest candidates have never actually held the title. They may currently be a Director of Business Operations, a strategy professional, a senior program manager, a transformation leader, a management consultant, or an Executive Assistant whose responsibilities have already grown into strategic and operational territory. Their current title may not say Chief of Staff. Their day-to-day work might already be doing the job. That shifts the search from matching a title to recognizing transferable capability, and it widens the candidate pool by keeping the focus on skills and track record rather than a narrow idea of what this person should look like on paper.
What to Look For in Candidate Talent
The strongest candidates combine qualities that don’t always show up together on a resume. Business judgment, to separate what genuinely needs executive attention from what doesn’t. Strategic thinking paired with the discipline to execute. Strong communication, and enough influence to move initiatives forward even without direct authority over the people involved.
Discretion matters, since the role often comes with access to sensitive information. Emotional intelligence matters just as much, since the Chief of Staff sits in the middle of organizational relationships and personalities all day. And somewhat counterintuitively, humility matters. This is a role built around influencing outcomes without necessarily getting credit for them. The best people in the seat are comfortable being behind the result rather than in front of it.
What Employers Should Expect to Pay
There’s no single market rate, because the title covers such a wide range of responsibility. That $167,954 average is directional, not a benchmark to plug into an offer letter. Company size, stage, experience level, location, and scope of responsibility all move the number, and a junior Chief of Staff at a growing company shouldn’t be paid the same as a senior professional acting as a CEO’s strategic proxy. Define the job first. Let the salary follow.
The Biggest Hiring Mistake
The most common mistake is hiring the title before defining the problem. A company shouldn’t create a Chief of Staff position just because other companies have one.
Before starting a search, it’s worth asking what’s actually missing. Is the CEO spending too much time coordinating instead of leading? Are initiatives losing momentum? Are departments siloed? Are decisions getting stuck? Is there a transformation underway that needs someone connecting the pieces? The answers to those questions should shape the role, and they might point to a Chief of Staff, or they might point to an operations leader, a project executive, or a senior Executive Assistant instead. The goal was never to hire a title. It’s to solve the problem that made the company consider one in the first place.
Where This Gets Harder Than a Typical Search and a Search Partner is a Resource
Finding someone who has held the title isn’t the hard part. Recognizing the right combination of experience, judgment, and executive presence for a specific organization is. That means looking past job titles and considering adjacent talent, which is where an experienced recruiting partner earns its keep.
Lloyd Staffing’s Business Operations specialty sits right at that intersection, executive support, operations, project leadership, coordination, and organizational execution, which matters when the ideal candidate doesn’t have a textbook Chief of Staff resume. Often, the right person is already doing most of the job under a different title. The work is in recognizing that, understanding what the organization actually needs, and knowing where to look. Lloyd has more than five decades of experience recruiting and filling roles at every level including senior leadership such as the CSO. The team welcomes your search.
Is a Chief of Staff Right for Your Organization?
The role isn’t obscure anymore, and its growth reflects something real about how companies are thinking about leadership capacity and cross-functional execution. For candidates, it offers a fast track to broad exposure across strategy, operations, and decision-making. For employers, it’s a way to add leadership capacity without adding another layer of management.
But the title was never the point. The point is finding the right person for the specific problem the organization needs solved. When the demands on leadership start outpacing the hours in the day, the right Chief of Staff can turn that complexity into focus, and give leaders back the time to lead.
If the timing is right to bring on this executive role at your organization, contact Lloyd Staffing – FIND TALENT
Start a conversation with a member of the Lloyd leadership team.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nancy Schuman, CSP is the former Chief Commuications Officer for LLoyd Staffing
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A recruitment and career specialist, Nancy has more than 40 years in the staffing industry – 27 of them with LLoyd. Now semi-retired, she remains an advocate for career education; she has advised thousands of candidates on their resumes and job searches while also serving as the Careers columnist for a large weekly Long Island newspaper. Nancy has written 11 popular books for job seekers and business professionals. You can find her Author’s page and books on Amazon. She continues to blog for Lloyd and coach job seekers at all levels, offering advice for today’s competitive workplace.