Why Executive Hires Fail in the First 18 Months

The failed senior hire almost never fails on what got them hired. The CV was real. The track record checked out. The interviews went well, and the references confirmed what the interviews suggested. Then, somewhere between month six and month eighteen, the hire unravels anyway. Boards usually file these failures under bad luck, chemistry, or politics. They are rarely any of those things. Most of them are a method error committed months earlier, during assessment, by a process that was never built to see it. The short answer Executive hires fail in the first 18 months because most assessment processes measure one thing and predict another. They measure capability : technical skills, soft skills, and management skills, which interviews and track records surface well. They use that evidence to predict identity outcomes : whether the person's values, motivation, and operating style can live

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