What to look for when the job will change under them

The failure statistics in senior hiring are worse than most boards assume, and they have been stable for long enough that they cannot be blamed on any particular market condition. Leadership IQ's study of more than 20,000 new hires found 46% failing within eighteen months. Estimates across the executive search literature — Center for Creative Leadership, Egon Zehnder, Heidrick & Struggles among them — cluster between 30% and 50% for senior appointments derailing or materially underperforming inside two years.

The second number is the one that should change how assessment is designed. Almost nobody fails because they could not do the technical work. They fail because they misread the culture, mishandled the politics, alienated a team they inherited, or misdiagnosed the situation they had walked into. Two-thirds of executive transition failures trace to relational, political and cultural causes.

And yet most interview processes are still built to test the thing that rarely fails. Technical depth is legible, comfortable to probe, and produces confident-feeling assessments. The attributes that actually predict outcome are harder to see, so they get proxied — by pedigree, by brand-name employers, by an impression of polish formed in the first ten minutes.

Five things worth assessing directly

None of these are novel. What is uncommon is testing them deliberately rather than hoping they surface.

• Behaviour under ambiguity. Not whether someone tolerates uncertainty in the abstract, but what they actually did when the data was incomplete and a decision could not wait. Ask for the decision they got wrong and what the early signals were that they missed.
• Ownership past the point of enjoyment. Most careers contain a stretch where the work stopped being interesting and the outcome still had to be delivered. What someone did in that stretch is more predictive than anything they did while things were going well.
• Coachability at seniority. Junior people are expected to take feedback. Senior people frequently stop receiving any. Ask for the last substantive piece of critical feedback they received, who gave it, and what changed afterwards. A blank here is a genuine signal.
• Reading an unfamiliar room. Put a real, unresolved problem from your business in front of them and watch what they ask before they answer. Candidates who advise immediately are demonstrating something, and it is not judgment.
• How they talk about people who are not present. Former teams, previous bosses, the predecessor in the seat. This is the cheapest available window into how they will talk about your organisation eighteen months from now.

A resume is a record of the past. What you are buying is behaviour in a future that does not exist yet — and those are only loosely correlated.

The scale trap

One specific misjudgment recurs often enough to name. Organisations scaling quickly tend to hire for the scale they aspire to rather than the one they occupy — bringing in a leader from a much larger business on the theory that they have 'already seen' the next phase.

Sometimes this works. More often it fails, because operating at scale and building toward it require nearly opposite capabilities. A leader from a mature organisation may have run a large function without ever having constructed one: no experience of hiring their own team from nothing, of working without infrastructure, or of making decisions with a fraction of the data they are used to. The gap is not seniority. It is that they are practised at operating a machine somebody else built.

The diagnostic question is not 'have you managed a function this size'. It is 'what did you build that did not exist before you arrived'.

Onboarding is part of the assessment, not a handoff

The failure data has an implication that most hiring processes ignore. If the majority of failures are cultural, relational and contextual, then the period in which those failures occur — the first ninety days — is not a separate HR workstream. It is the phase in which the hiring decision is actually resolved.

The three root causes that recur are consistent: cultural misalignment, misaligned expectations about the role's real scope and authority, and inadequate onboarding. All three are addressable before they become terminal, and all three are invisible to a process that treats the signed offer as the finish line.