You are about to hand someone responsibility for the safety of your people and your facilities, and you are going to do it on the strength of a few meetings and a resume. You do not have a security background, so you cannot easily tell the difference between someone who has actually led a program and someone who has spent a career adjacent to one. That is an uncomfortable position for a careful executive, and the discomfort is appropriate.
This article is about how to evaluate a fractional security director before you hire one, using the same discipline you would apply to a fractional CFO or an outside general counsel. The good news is that you do not need to understand security to judge a security leader. You need to know what to ask for, what to check, and which answers should end the conversation. I have sat on both sides of this table, and what follows is the evaluation I would want a client to run on me.
Look for Leadership Experience, Not Just Field Experience
The field is full of capable people who have spent decades responding to incidents but have never been accountable for a program. That distinction matters more than anything else on the resume. Ask the candidate to describe a program they were responsible for from end to end: the budget they controlled, the policies they wrote, the vendors they managed, the leadership they reported to, and what changed under their watch. Then ask what went wrong during that tenure and what they did about it. Someone who has really led will have a ready answer to the second question, because every real program has failures in it.
Breadth also matters for a fractional role. A director who has only ever worked in one sector will tend to import that sector’s assumptions into yours. Someone who has moved across law enforcement, fire and life safety, private security, and government has seen how the same problem looks from several angles and is less likely to reach for a single familiar solution. Ask where they have worked and what they learned in each place that they still use.
Ask for Written Work and Read It Yourself
A director’s most important product is a document that leadership can read, understand, and act on. Ask for a sample assessment, a policy, or a board briefing, with client details removed. Then read it as the executive you are. If you cannot follow it, your board will not follow it either, and a plan nobody understands is a plan nobody funds. If it is mostly equipment recommendations, you are looking at a sales document. If it ranks risks, explains the reasoning, separates what costs money from what costs only attention, and tells you what to do first, you are looking at the work of a leader.
Pay attention to whether the writing distinguishes between what was found and what was assumed. My own doctrine, laid out in Until Tested: Security Is Only Assumed through the P.R.O.O.F. framework, is that a control nobody has verified is a control the organization is only hoping works. A candidate whose written work reflects that distinction will run your program the same way. A candidate whose sample reads like a list of best practices copied from an industry guide will run it that way too.
Check for Conflicts and Independence
Ask directly whether the candidate has any financial relationship with guard companies, integrators, equipment manufacturers, or monitoring firms, and get the answer in writing. A director who earns a referral fee from the vendor they recommend is not evaluating that vendor on your behalf. This is one of the most common ways organizations end up overspending on security, and it is almost invisible from the outside because the recommendations always sound reasonable. Independence is part of what you are paying for, and it should be stated in the agreement.
Also ask how many other clients the candidate currently serves and how the time is allocated. A fractional model works because the director’s time is divided among a small number of organizations that each get real attention. It stops working when the director has taken on more retainers than there are days in the month. You do not need a specific number, but you do need a candid answer and a sense of what happens when two clients have an emergency at once.
Call the References and Ask the Right Questions
References are only useful if you ask them something beyond whether the candidate was good to work with. Ask the reference what the director found in the first quarter that leadership did not know about. Ask what changed in the organization as a result, and whether the changes held after the director moved on. Ask how the director handled a disagreement with an executive or a department head, and whether the board understood the briefings. Ask whether the director ever recommended spending less rather than more, because a director who only ever recommends more is not doing the whole job.
If you can, speak to someone who was not on the candidate’s list. A former security manager who reported to the director, or a facilities lead who had to implement the director’s plan, will give you a picture that a CEO reference may not. The question for them is simple: did the director make your job clearer and your program better, or did the director make presentations and leave.
Run a Small Test Before the Retainer
The best evaluation is a short piece of real work. Ask the candidate to spend a day on site, walk one facility, review a handful of documents, and write you a two page summary of what they saw and what they would do first. Pay for the day. What you get back will tell you more than any interview. You will see how they treat your staff, whether they ask about people before they ask about cameras, whether they pull on doors or only look at them, and whether the summary is written for you or for another security professional.
Watch for a few signs that should end the process. A candidate who proposes equipment before finishing the assessment is selling rather than leading. A candidate who cannot explain a risk in plain language, or who becomes impatient when you ask them to, will not survive your board. A candidate who promises that nothing will ever happen on their watch is either inexperienced or dishonest, because every experienced security leader knows that the job is to reduce and prepare rather than to guarantee. What you want is someone who tells you what they do not yet know, how they will find out, and what it will take to fix what they find.
Go Deeper
For the full picture of what the role is, what it costs, and how it compares to a consultant or a full-time hire, start with What Is a Fractional Security Director? The Complete Guide. My book Fractional Security Director includes a full chapter on selecting and evaluating a director, including the questions I recommend clients ask me.
Commissioner William Epps is a former elected Fire Commissioner, federal law-enforcement supervisor, and firefighter since 2006, with instructor credentials in Hazardous Materials response, Active Shooter preparedness, and Stop the Bleed®. He spent seven years in federal law enforcement in physical security, executive protection, and incident command, and now serves organizations as a Fractional Security Director. He is the author of The Spirit of Saul, The Spirit of Pharaoh, and other practical books on security, leadership, and faith, built around one idea: knowledge should be practical enough to use when it matters.
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