The Real Cost Goes Far Beyond the Search Fee

A bad executive hire costs 6 to 15 times the hired executive's annual salary when you factor in the full cost of organizational damage. Not the search fee. Not the salary. The total organizational cost. This is what most boards and CEOs miss when they retrospectively audit failed hires at the C-level.

When an executive fails after six months, you're paying for:

  • Lost strategy execution (6-9 months of lost progress on company direction)
  • Direct reports who leave because working for the wrong person is worse than not having a leader at all
  • Team morale erosion—your best people leave first
  • Board confidence shaken (which affects fundraising, M&A conversations, strategic partnerships)
  • The cost of unwinding decisions they made (wrong vendor contracts, misaligned hires in their org, bad partnerships)
  • The search and onboarding cost to find their replacement
  • The productivity hole while the organization realigns around a new leader
A hire who fails in month 8 instead of month 2 doesn't save you money. It costs you more. You've lost twice as much time, and the organizational damage compounds.

The 90-Day Guarantee Is Fundamentally Broken

Most executive search firms offer 90-day replacement guarantees. This sounds good until you realize that most executive failures don't manifest in 90 days.

Here's what actually happens:

Months 1-3: The executive is on a performance high. They're proving their pedigree. They're charming the board. They're making promises about what's coming. No red flags yet.

Months 4-6: Organizational cracks appear. You start seeing complaints from direct reports. Decisions they made start looking questionable. Strategy execution is slower than expected. Board members start asking questions.

Month 7+: It's clear this isn't working. But you're now far outside the 90-day window. The search firm is off the hook. You own the failure. And the organizational damage is real.

The traditional 90-day guarantee protects the recruiter, not you. It's designed for junior or mid-level hires where fit mismatches surface quickly. Executive roles don't work that way. Executive success or failure is a 12-15 month story.

What "Fit" Actually Means at the Executive Level

Most recruiting conversations about executive fit focus on culture. "Do they fit our culture?" This is backward. Culture is flexible. Operating model fit is what matters.

An exceptional executive from Google might fail at a Series B company not because of culture clash, but because:

  • They're used to 500-person orgs and you have 25 people. They can't operate without systems and processes you don't have.
  • They've always had a massive budget and instant resources. Bootstrap required is a different muscle.
  • They've had specialized teams. In your startup, they need to be generalists.
  • Their background is enterprise sales and you're PLG. Different playbooks entirely.

Operating model fit is about whether they've succeeded in an environment with similar:

  • Scale (headcount, revenue)
  • Go-to-market strategy
  • Organizational structure
  • Pace of change and ambiguity tolerance
  • Decision-making style (consensus vs. dictatorial)
  • Resource constraints

When we evaluate executive candidates, we're not asking "are they brilliant?" (they all are). We're asking "have they succeeded in an operating environment like yours?"

Why FoundHuman Guarantees 15 Months, Not 90 Days

We offer 15-month satisfaction guarantees because that's the actual timeline where executive success or failure becomes clear. Here's what that means:

We're not betting against you. Our guarantee forces us to be obsessive about operating model fit during the search. We need to get this right because we own the risk for a full year. That's not a marketing gimmick. It's a fundamental misalignment of incentives that makes us better.

We're invested in first-year retention. 93% of executives we place are still in their role after 12 months. That's not luck. That's because we:

  • Spend 4x more time on operating model fit than credential fit
  • Coach both sides through the first 90 days (when culture shock can be mistaken for misfit)
  • Do structured onboarding that sets executives up for success
  • Stay connected to the executive and board for the full year

We're measuring the right metric. Not speed to placement. Not cost per hire. First-year retention. That's the only metric that tells you if the process actually worked.

The Hard Conversation at the Board Table

If you've had an executive failure, the hardest conversation isn't with the executive. It's with your board. Because the board approved the hire (or at minimum, didn't object). Which means:

The search process wasn't rigorous enough, OR the due diligence on operating model fit was insufficient, OR the onboarding set them up to fail, OR you made the hire for the wrong reasons (optics, pressure, timeline).

The best boards own this. And they're the ones that change their recruiting process for the next hire. They demand that their recruiting partner own the outcome, not just the placement.

What High-Performing Companies Do Differently

Companies that don't have serial executive failures do a few things consistently:

1. They define operating model fit explicitly. Before they even start searching, they're clear about the environment the executive will inherit. Scale, pace, structure, constraints, board dynamics. And they're honest about it.

2. They slow down the process for the right fit. Not slow. But willing to wait 4 months instead of 6 weeks if the right person is in exploration mode. Speed kills at the executive level.

3. They invest in onboarding. Not orientation. Onboarding. The first 90 days matter enormously for helping an executive understand organizational context, political dynamics, what's unspoken, what decisions were made for reasons that won't be immediately obvious.

4. They stay connected to the process past day one. Regular check-ins with the executive. Feedback from their team. Board-level feedback. This isn't babysitting. It's ensuring problems surface early enough to be fixable.

5. They own the guarantee. They partner with a recruiter who's aligned on the 15-month outcome metric, not the 90-day replacement guarantee. Because the guarantee you get is the process you deserve.

The Bottom Line

A bad executive hire is expensive. Measured in opportunity cost, organizational damage, and morale destruction, it's often the most expensive hire a company makes. The real cost isn't the salary. It's not the search fee. It's the 6-9 months of lost momentum while the organization resets.

Which means it's worth being slow, rigorous, and obsessive about operating model fit. It's worth finding a recruiting partner who's aligned on 15-month outcomes, not 90-day coverage. And it's worth doing the work to set that executive up for success in month 1, not just placing them and moving on.

The executives you place set the trajectory for your organization. They deserve the same rigor as your product.