More than 40% of senior hires don't last 18 months.
That’s after recruiter fees, interview rounds, onboarding, and countless hours of leadership attention. And when the hire fails, most companies treat it as a people problem.
Often it’s actually a clarity problem.
The gap usually starts with the job description.
A poorly designed role attracts the wrong candidates and filters out the right ones before anyone has even reviewed a CV. From there, the rest of the process inherits the same confusion.
Most organisations still run interviews with little structure or alignment. Different leaders assess different things. Consensus is expected to emerge somehow anyway.
Then come the downstream costs: replacement searches, delayed projects, leadership distraction, team disruption, and another expensive hiring cycle.
Most companies respond by buying better recruitment tools or changing vendors.
But tools don’t solve deeper organisational ambiguity.
If the business itself is unclear about:
what capability is actually missing
where accountability should sit
how decisions are made
or what success in the role truly looks like
then hiring becomes an expensive form of guessing.
The strongest hiring processes usually begin long before recruitment starts.
They begin with organisational clarity.