2025 CMO Moves Report
The CMO job market is back, and our retained search desk is busier than ever. Companies are once again hiring senior marketing leaders at scale, and everyone is trying to decode what that means. Who’s getting the top jobs? What are employers really looking for? And how do those stories line up?
At Taligence, for the second year running, we dared to find out. Our proprietary talent intelligence engine explored 501 CMO hires and 172 job postings for the marketing seat at the top of the functional ladder. This report considers the market in two dimensions: the leaders being appointed and the roles being posted.
One shows the supply of proven operators rising through the ranks; the other shows how companies are defining what a modern CMO is meant to be. Together, they offer the clearest snapshot yet of how marketing leadership is evolving.
Patterns emerge on both sides: hiring has roared back, but hired profiles remain conservative choices; role specs have expanded, but real authority and control is not always obvious. The gaps and opportunities sit in that disconnect.
This is what we do at Taligence: turn noise into signal. The patterns are in the data. The story is in how you read it.
CMO Appointments:
Leadership Moves & Career Pathways
In this section, we look at who is actually being appointed into CMO roles globally. Over the past year, we tracked publicly announced CMO appointments at companies with 200 or more employees, drawing from company press releases and business media worldwide. Our focus is on the most senior marketing leader responsible for setting brand strategy and positioning at the global level; regional marketing leaders are included only in cases where a company does not have a centralized global CMO role.
For each appointment, we reviewed publicly available information, such as LinkedIn profiles and company disclosures, to understand the individual’s career path, prior CMO experience, industry background, education, and whether the role was filled through internal promotion or external hire. By analyzing these profiles across industries and company sizes, we observed recurring patterns in how CMOs are being hired today and how expectations for senior marketing leadership are shifting over time.
This analysis reflects publicly announced and verifiable appointments; confidential hires, unannounced internal reshuffles, interim assignments, and stealth transitions that were not disclosed externally are not captured in this dataset.
Key Findings:
1. Global and U.S. Trends
- CMO hiring accelerated sharply in 2025, marking a decisive rebound in senior marketing leadership movement. Globally, 501 new CMOs were announced, up from 310 in 2024, representing a 61.6% year-over-year increase.
- The U.S. remained the most active market for CMO appointments. A total of 356 CMOs were appointed domestically in 2025, a 41.8% increase from the 251 appointments recorded in 2024. This surge closely mirrors patterns observed in our senior-level marketing job data, where C-level marketing postings steadily increased from early 2024 through the end of 2025.
- Beyond the U.S., global CMO hiring expanded at an even faster pace. A total of 145 CMOs were appointed across 30 non-U.S. countries in 2025, representing a 145.8% year-over-year increase. England led international hiring with 34 new CMOs, followed by India (27), Australia (17), Germany (10), and Canada (9).
- Within the U.S., CMO hiring activity was most concentrated in California (76), New York (52), Texas (35), Massachusetts (22), and Florida (17).
2. Industry Breakdown
- CMO hiring expanded across nearly all industries in 2025, with particularly strong growth in sectors undergoing structural or competitive transformation.
- Top hiring industries included:
- Tech: 161 hires (+54.8% YoY)
- Professional Services: 66 hires (+69.2% YoY)
- Financial Services: 58 hires (+93.3% YoY)
- Retail: 45 hires (+114.3% YoY)
- Media, Sports & Entertainment: 32 hires (+14.3% YoY)
3. Company Size
- Mid-sized organizations were the most active CMO hirers in 2025. Companies with 201 - 500 employees announced the highest number of new CMOs overall.
- Companies in the 501-1,000 employee range posted the fastest growth in CMO hiring, with appointments increasing 135.6% year-over-year. In contrast, companies with 5,001 - 10,000 employees announced the fewest new CMOs during the year.
4. Gender Balance
- Gender representation at the CMO level softened modestly in 2025. Women accounted for 54.7% of new CMO appointments, down from 58.1% in 2024.
- Industries leaning more female in CMO hiring included Non-profit Organizations, Logistics (only 1 CMO hired), Automotive, Education, and Hotel & Travel. By contrast, Construction, CPG, Media, Sports & Entertainment, and Professional Services showed a slight male skew.
- Larger organizations continued to appoint a higher proportion of female CMOs, particularly companies with more than 5,001 employees.
5. Diversity
- Diversity among newly appointed CMOs improved. In 2025, 15.8% of new CMO appointments were identified as diverse, up from 13.9% in 2024.
- Media, Sports & Entertainment led all industries, with 28.1% of new CMOs coming from ethnically diverse backgrounds. Automotive and Non-profit Organizations also showed progress, with diverse leaders accounting for roughly one-quarter of new appointments in each sector.
6. Experience
- The average experience level of newly appointed CMOs edged higher in 2025, reaching 25.4 years, compared with 24.7 years in 2024 and 24.5 years in 2023.
- Industries skewing younger in their CMO hires included Logistics (only 1 CMO hired), Media, Sports & Entertainment (23.8 years), Construction (23.8 years), and Retail (24 years).
- By contrast, the most experienced CMOs were hired in Automotive (29.3 years), Non-profit Organizations (27.8 years), and BioTech, Pharma, Healthcare & Wellness (27.2 years).
- From a company-size perspective, organizations with more than 10,000 employees hired the most experienced CMOs on average.
7. Education
- MBA representation among new CMOs remained substantial in 2025, with 36.3% holding an MBA. This reflects a slight decline of 2.1 percentage points from 2024, though still well above 2023 level (32.4%).
- Industries with the highest share of MBA-holding CMOs included Education (62.5%), Manufacturing (45.8%), CPG (40.9%), Media, Sports & Entertainment (40.6%), and Professional Services (39.4%).
- Larger enterprises continued to value formal business education most strongly. Companies with more than 10,000 employees hired the highest proportion of MBA-trained CMOs, while companies with 201 - 500 employees hired the lowest.
8. First-Time CMOs
- First-time CMO appointments continued to rise in 2025. A total of 43.5% of newly hired CMOs were stepping into the role for the first time, up from 39.4% in 2024.
- Industries most open to first-time CMOs included Automotive (75%), Construction (66.7%), Manufacturing (66.7%), and BioTech, Pharma, Healthcare & Wellness (61.5%).
- Conversely, Non-profit Organizations, Education, and Tech showed a stronger preference for experienced CMOs, with first-time appointments remaining limited.
- Companies with 201 - 500 employees were the most willing to appoint first-time CMOs, while organizations with 5,001 - 10,000 employees were the least open to first-time leadership transitions.
9. Industry Travelers
- Cross-industry mobility declined further in 2025. Only 10.2% of CMOs were hired from entirely unrelated industries, down from 11.9% in 2024.
- Education saw the highest share of industry travelers (62.5%), followed by Media, Sports & Entertainment (34.4%), Automotive (25%), and Hotel & Travel (23.8%).
- Large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees were the most open to hiring CMOs without direct category experience, while companies with 501 - 1,000 employees were the most resistant.
10. Internal Promotion vs. External Hires
- Internal promotion remained relatively rare at the CMO level. In 2025, only 16.4% of CMOs were promoted from within, a marginal increase from 16.1% in 2024. The vast majority (83.6%) were external hires.
- Retail, Hotel & Travel, Automotive, Manufacturing, and Non-profit Organizations showed the highest rates of internal promotion.
- Larger organizations were more likely to promote from within. Companies with more than 10,000 employees promoted 25.6% of their new CMOs internally, followed by companies with 5,001 - 10,000 employees at 22.4%.
11. Fractional to Permanent
- The pathway from fractional to permanent CMO roles continued to gain traction. In 2025, 8.8% of new CMOs previously served in a fractional capacity, up from 7.4% in 2024.
- Tech, Professional Services, Media, Sports & Entertainment, Financial Services, and Retail hired the most CMOs whose immediately prior role was fractional.
12. Remote CMOs
- Remote leadership continued to retreat at the CMO level. Only 8.2% of CMOs appointed in 2025 were working remotely, down from 12.9% in 2024 and 22.5% in 2023.
- Tech (17.4%) and Construction (16.7%) recorded the highest shares of remote CMO appointments.
- Smaller and mid-sized companies offered greater flexibility overall. Companies with 501 - 1,000 employees reported 15.1% of CMOs working remotely, followed by companies with 201 - 500 employees at 11%.
13. Agency Background
- Agency-to-CMO transitions remained exceedingly rare. Just 4.2% of new CMOs in 2025 had recent agency experience within the past 10 years, and only 10 were hired directly from agencies.
- This pattern is consistent with prior years. In 2024, only 5 of 310 new CMOs were hired directly from an agency background.
CMO Job Postings:
Employer Demand & Role Expectations
In this section, we shift from who is being appointed into CMO roles to how companies are defining the CMO role they are trying to hire for. We analyzed 172 CMO job postings at U.S.-based companies with over 200 employees, capturing how organizations across industries and size bands articulate their expectations for senior marketing leadership.
The analysis focuses on full-time, in-house CMO roles and examines how employers describe scope of responsibility, required skills and experience, reporting lines, work location, and success metrics. By systematically reviewing job descriptions rather than anecdotal examples, we observed consistent patterns in how the CMO role is being designed, what capabilities are most in demand, and how expectations vary by industry and company scale.
Together with the CMO Appointments analysis, this section provides the demand-side perspective of the market, revealing not just who is getting hired as a CMO, but what companies believe a modern CMO should be accountable for in 2025.
This review reflects how companies formally describe CMO roles in published job postings; informal scope adjustments, evolving mandates post-hire, and expectations communicated outside the written job description are not observable in this dataset.
1. Scope: “CMO” increasingly means a corporate-wide operating leader
Across the 172 postings, the most common “scope signals” show CMOs are being hired as enterprise operators who own both narrative and measurable growth.
What the dataset shows (share of postings mentioning each):
- Brand/positioning: 89.5% (154/172)
- Communications / PR: 72.7% (125/172)
- Marketing ops / analytics / dashboards / attribution: 61.6% (106/172)
- Lifecycle/retention language: 46.5% (80/172)
- Performance / paid / SEM / programmatic: 40.1% (69/172)
- Demand / pipeline / lead gen language: 35.5% (61/172)
- ABM: 7.6% (13/172)
Most employers are writing the CMO job as “brand + enterprise comms + measurable growth”. In many postings, you see the full-funnel framing explicitly (e.g., “transform marketing into a strategic growth engine” plus ownership of “KPIs and ROI dashboards”).
2. Career pathing: the “experience bar” clusters around 10 to 15 years
Only a portion of postings explicitly state years of experience, but when they do, the pattern is clear: the most common requirements sit in the 10 - 15 year band, typically paired with “enterprise leadership,” change management, and cross-functional executive presence.
3. Reporting lines: when stated, CEO/President is the dominant destination
Only 28% of postings clearly state reporting line (48/172). In that subset:
- President: 17
- CEO: 19
- Chief Growth Officer: 3
- Chief Revenue Officer: 3
- Others (COO/CCO/Dean): smaller counts
Reporting lines most often point to President or CEO, reinforcing that many orgs want the CMO positioned as a true executive peer (not a service function).
4. Work model: hybrid is the single most common “named” arrangement, yet many postings don’t specify
Among postings that do specify (63/172):
- Hybrid: 44.4% (28)
- On-site: 36.5% (23)
- Remote: 19.0% (12)
Hybrid expectations are often stated very concretely. For example, some roles specify “three days onsite, two days remote.”
5. Tech stack: postings emphasize capability outcomes more than tool brand names
Tool/stack mentions in postings (count of postings containing term):
- CRM: 51
- SEO: 49
- SEM: 36
- Marketing automation: 36
- Martech / marketing technology: 31
Named tools are less common:
- Salesforce: 8
- HubSpot: 6 (sometimes explicitly “required”)
- GA4/Google Analytics: 7
6. KPI language: ROI and retention dominate; “pipeline math” appears, but less often than many assume
KPI terms appearing in postings:
- ROI: 83 (48.3%)
- Retention/Churn: 59 (34.3%)
- Brand awareness/SOV: 47 (27.3%)
- Pipeline: 22 (12.8%)
- LTV: 20 (11.6%)
- CAC: 11 (6.4%)
Some postings get very explicit about KPI stacks and paid-growth economics (e.g., listing CAC, payback period, etc.), but that level of specificity is not the norm.
7. Industry and Company Size: where expectations diverge
Industry
- Professional Services: heavier emphasis on reputation, thought leadership, sales enablement, and firmwide GTM orchestration—often with large inherited marketing functions (e.g., “~70+ FTEs”)
- Education: frequent blending of marketing + communications + enrollment/advancement scope, with reporting lines often tied closely to the President’s office
- Tech: more frequent growth narratives and “system-building” language; comp packages more likely to mention equity/perks explicitly.
Company Size
- 201 - 1,000: “builder” language is more common; scope may be broader with fewer layers.
- 1,001 - 10,000: more matrixed leadership; clearer emphasis on ops cadence, governance, and performance reporting.
- 10,000+: more stakeholder complexity (multiple business units, comms risk, brand governance), and reporting-line clarity is more likely when specified.
Conclusion
On the supply side, companies are hiring CMOs at a faster pace than in recent years, yet the profile of who gets appointed remains conservative. Most roles go to externally hired leaders with deep category familiarity, long operating tenures, and prior experience managing complexity. First-time CMOs are entering the market in greater numbers, but primarily through mid-sized organizations willing to invest in potential. Fractional pathways are gaining legitimacy, though they remain a narrow on-ramp rather than a mainstream channel. Agency-to-CMO transitions are still extremely rare, reinforcing the premium placed on in-house operational credibility.
On the demand side, job postings reveal an increasingly expansive role design. CMOs are being positioned as enterprise-wide operators responsible not only for brand and communications, but also for measurable growth, organizational alignment, and executive-level decision-making. Yet many postings stop short of clearly articulating ownership of revenue mechanics, pipeline math, or commercial authority, creating a potentially dangerous gap between accountability and control that candidates should scrutinize carefully.
Taken together, these two lenses expose a central tension in the market: companies want CMOs who can operate like general managers, but they continue to hire, and design roles, for leaders who fit a more traditional, risk-mitigated profile. Flexibility has receded, internal talent is frequently overlooked, and category experience still outweighs transferable leadership skills in most hiring decisions.
For CMO candidates, credibility comes from operating depth, cross-functional fluency, and the ability to translate brand into enterprise outcomes - not from tool expertise alone. For employers, the data raises harder questions: whether role expectations are realistic, whether internal pipelines are underdeveloped, and whether the way CMOs are hired truly aligns with the transformation companies say they want.
In the 2025 CMO market, potential opens doors. Proof decides who walks through them.
