Collection
Why executive hiring fails, what better looks like, and the infrastructure that fixes it.
23 pieces
Hiring40–50% of executive hires fail within 18 months. The industry has accepted this as a market condition rather than a methodology failure. It is a methodology failure. Reliability in executive search is not an accident, it is the product of specific process decisions that most search firms do not make.
HiringThe objection to retained executive search is almost always framed as a fee problem. The fee is not the expensive part. What happens when the search methodology fails is.
HiringMost AI recruiting claims are marketing. A smaller set of AI applications create genuine, measurable operational improvement. The difference matters, not as a technology question but as an operations question.
HiringAn ATS is a candidate database with workflow automation. Hiring infrastructure is something different, the observability, recovery, and execution layer that prevents the database from becoming a graveyard. Conflating them is why most VP searches stall.
HiringMost companies have internal recruiters. Most companies still fail at executive hiring. These two facts are not in tension, they follow directly from how internal recruiting functions are built, what they are optimized for, and where that optimization stops working.
HiringThe most common thing I hear from hiring managers is 'we need someone exceptional.' After five years and 25+ placements, I have learned that exceptional is almost never what they mean.
HiringThe opportunity gap is usually discussed as a problem of who gets found. The more important problem is what happens after they're found, and why the system destroys more opportunity than talent scarcity ever does.
HiringThe 50-day executive search is not a faster version of the standard process. It is a different architecture, one designed to eliminate the four delay patterns that make most VP and C-suite searches take 120 days. This is the process behind the 41-day close.
HiringMost executive search failures are diagnosed at the point of failure. The actual cause is almost always upstream, in decisions made at the start of the search that made failure inevitable before outreach began.
HiringMost companies treat retained and contingency search as two price points for the same service. They are structurally different models with different incentives, and the difference in incentives explains almost every quality gap between them.
HiringThe CTO talent pool in India is deep. Almost every company looking for one searches in the wrong places using the wrong signals, and the reason why reveals something important about how Indian technical leadership actually forms.
HiringAcross the VP-level mandates we track, 68% stall at or before week 10. The cause is almost never the talent market. It's almost always the execution layer, and whether anyone can see inside it.
HiringThe cost of a fragmented recruiting stack isn't the software spend. It's execution delay, and every week of delay on a VP-level search compounds in ways that don't appear on any invoice.
HiringMost VP searches don't fail because of the talent market. They fail because of four specific infrastructure failure modes that compound across every stage of execution.
HiringA $275K executive search that two firms couldn't close in 60+ days closed in 41. What made the difference wasn't luck or connections. It was a different system.
HiringThe companies treating hiring as a workflow to be completed are losing to companies treating it as infrastructure to be maintained.
Hiring40–50% of executive hires fail within 18 months, not because the wrong person was selected, but because of three failure modes that play out after the offer is signed. They are specific, predictable, and mostly preventable.
HiringMoving from #87 to #18 in the World Staffing Leader rankings tells two stories. One is about a firm getting sharper. The other is about an industry where doing this work with genuine rigour still moves you up the list fast, because so few firms actually do it.
HiringRecruiting teams have always tracked metrics. The shift is toward treating hiring as a system that can be monitored, diagnosed, and recovered, before it fails.
HiringThe organizations winning the talent competition are not the ones with the best sourcing. They are the ones who can see and manage their hiring systems in real time.
HiringThe cost of hiring the wrong executive is not 6–9 months of salary. The actual number, and the mechanisms that drive it, is worse than most organizations have calculated.
HiringIntelligence hiring is not about smarter tools. It is about redesigning what the hiring process is optimized to produce, and why traditional hiring almost always optimizes for the wrong thing.
HiringExecutive search is not being replaced. It is being divided, into the parts that AI will absorb and the parts that become more valuable.