Here’s a number worth a double-take: nearly half of all new hires, especially at the senior level, fail within their first 18 months.
Leadership IQ tracked more than 20,000 new hires across a range of industries and found that 46% failed within 18 months on the job. Heidrick & Struggles, one of the most well-known executive search firms in the world, put the number at 40% for senior-level hires specifically. Likewise, DDI’s Leadership Transitions Report 2021, which surveyed more than 15,000 leaders across 1,740 organizations, found that nearly half of executives are considered failures when hired from outside the organization. Across studies and sources, the number consistently lands somewhere between 40% and 50%.
Mike Dixon, President and COO of Hoops, has seen this firsthand across dozens of client engagements. “If 47% of more and more senior-level hires are going to fail,” he said on a recent episode of The Business Blueprint, “then we need to start asking why, before we go back out and do the exact same thing again.” And honestly, the answer is more fixable than most people realize.
So Why Do Most Senior Hires Fail?
What’s interesting is that we’ve known senior hires fail at these rates after years of research. And yet the default approach to hiring hasn’t changed much: write a job description, post it, interview some people, pick someone, and hope for the best.
Most leaders, when a hire doesn’t work out, assume the issue is always the candidate. Thoughts like “we got the wrong person”, or “their resume looked better than the reality”, or “they oversold themselves in the interview.”
Sometimes that’s true. But Leadership IQ’s research found that only 11% of leadership hiring failures came down to technical or hard skills. The other 89% came down to things like coachability, motivation, temperament, and how well someone fit the environment they were walking into.
That’s not directly a candidate’s character flaw, but a process gap. It means most companies are screening, hiring, and evaluating people almost entirely on the wrong things. If you built your job description around hard skills, interviewed for hard skills, and then lost someone because of how they worked with the team or how they responded to feedback, the process didn’t account for what actually determines whether someone succeeds. And if no one invested in developing those things once they were in the door, that’s not on the candidate either.
The fix starts well before anyone accepts an offer.
Reason #1: The Job Description Doesn’t Match Reality
This is one of the most consistent issues Mike sees, and it’s also one of the easiest to overlook. “Does the job description of what you’re hiring for accurately reflect your expectations of what that person is going to do?” he said on The Business Blueprint. “It continues to amaze me how many folks don’t do that.”
A job description that’s vague, aspirational, or built around what the last person in the role happened to do isn’t actually a job description. It’s a wish list. And when a new hire shows up and finds out the role is meaningfully different from what they were recruited for (different scope, different expectations, different level of support), you’ve already set the relationship up to struggle.
This is especially common in growing companies where roles are evolving fast. What the position needed six months ago may not be what it needs now. If you’re hiring a head of sales to drive net new revenue but your job description was written when the role was more about managing existing accounts, you’re setting someone up to fail from the first conversation.
Before you post anything, it’s worth asking: if I describe this role honestly, the good, the hard, and the unglamorous parts, would I still attract the right person? If the answer is yes, you’re in good shape. If you find yourself softening things to make the role sound more appealing, that’s worth paying attention to.
Reason #2: No One’s Investing in Leadership Development Anymore
This is something Mike brings up consistently, and it’s worth taking seriously. We have underinvested in leadership development across industries and company sizes for a long time, and the failure rates we’re seeing now are at least partly a result of that.
“In this country, we have failed to invest in serious leadership and talent development for decades,” Mike said on The Business Blueprint. “Startup culture is not real big on spending on leadership training. We got away from the science-based stuff that works.”
The data backs this up. Research from CCL consistently shows that 70% of leadership development comes from on-the-job experience (stretch assignments, turnaround situations, expanded scope). This is not the same as “figure it out on your own,” but structured experiences with real support to learn and fail along the way. Another 20% comes from feedback: coaching, assessments, and honest performance conversations. Only 10% comes from formal training. And yet most companies, when they invest in development at all, go straight to the formal training piece.
What that looks like in reality: a new senior hire shows up, gets handed a laptop, and is essentially expected to figure it out. No structured plan, no clear definition of what success looks like in the first 30, 60, or 90 days, and no real feedback loop. Then everyone’s shocked when it doesn’t work out.
Reason #3: The Onboarding Period Is Being Completely Underestimated
“Just because you got the hire, that’s just the beginning of the game,” Mike said on the AI Growth Blueprint podcast. “Those first 90 days are absolutely critical for getting that person productive and ensuring that they’re going to stay in your organization.”
This is one of the most expensive and avoidable drivers of early-tenure failure. Companies spend significant time and money finding the right person, and then effectively hand them a badge and a laptop and assume the rest will work itself out.
It won’t. Not reliably, anyway.
For senior hires specifically, the first 90 days aren’t just about learning the systems and meeting the team. They’re about scanning the environment, understanding the dynamics, building trust with the people they need to work alongside, and establishing some early credibility, all while figuring out whether they made the right decision in taking the role. That’s a lot to navigate without any real structure around it.
Mike referenced a leadership assimilation process he learned from his time in the military: a structured, multi-meeting approach to help a new leader understand the team’s needs and the broader environment before they’re expected to deliver results. It’s an older technique, he says, but one that needs to come back. “When we see a company that has a lot of concentrated turnover in the first 90 days, that’s a big warning signal that we need to change some things,” he said on the AI Growth Blueprint.
The fix doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to exist. A clear plan for week one, month one, and the first quarter. A point person who owns the new leader’s integration. Plus honest, early conversations about what success looks like and where the landmines are.
Reason #4: Companies Don’t Have the Tactical Patience to Let It Work
Even when companies do the other things reasonably well, this one trips them up. Mike talked about it on The Business Blueprint using a concept he picked up in the military: tactical patience.
“You need to have as part of your planning, as part of your action, the patience to let the situation develop,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re micromanaging them and a lot of time it ends in failure.”
What usually happens: a company hires a senior sales leader. By month three, the pipeline isn’t full yet and the revenue isn’t flowing. The hiring manager gets nervous, starts second-guessing the hire, maybe pulls back on support. By month nine, they’ve moved on and are starting the whole process over again.
Here’s what Mike points out: a good senior seller realistically takes six to nine months to generate real returns. If you hire someone in October and expect a full pipeline by January, the math doesn’t work. Setting that expectation before someone starts (and being honest about the ramp timeline) can save a lot of unnecessary friction on both sides.
The companies that are actually retaining senior hires are the ones that hire carefully, set realistic timelines, and give people real room to work and grow into their role. That still means clear metrics and regular feedback. It also means not panicking three months in when someone is still in their onboarding window.
What This Looks Like When It Goes Right
Hoops has worked with clients who’ve cut turnover nearly in half by changing the process — not the pay, not the benefits, not the title. One of our clients came in with a turnover rate of around 40%. By improving the hiring process, adding disciplined interviewing, investing in some frontline leadership development, and creating better employee engagement, that number came down to around 23%.
“We didn’t change the pay,” Mike said on The Automated Advantage podcast. “We didn’t change anything else. But we really said, okay, we’re going to invest in a good hiring process, discipline interviewing, some frontline leadership training, some better employee engagement.”
What changed was the process around them, which made all the difference. You get out what you put in, and when you actually invest in setting people up to succeed, they usually do.
So What Can You Actually Do?
If you’re a growing company and that 46% number is making you uncomfortable, here’s a practical place to start:
1. Look at your job descriptions honestly. Not for keywords or formatting, but for accuracy. Does it reflect what this person will actually be doing day to day? Does it communicate what success looks like? Does it give a realistic picture of the environment they’re walking into?
2. Have an onboarding plan ready before you make an offer. Not after. If you don’t have one, that’s worth sorting out before you bring someone in. Knowing how you’ll integrate this person is part of the hiring decision, not an afterthought.
3. Define what success looks like in the first 90 days, specifically.“Hit the ground running” isn’t a plan. What should they know, who should they have met, and what should they have accomplished by day 30, 60, and 90?
4. Build in regular feedback early. Consistent, frequent one-on-ones and honest check-ins in the first few months surface problems before they become bigger ones. These conversations also help the new hire feel supported, which matters more than most leaders expect.
5. Give it time, with accountability. Tactical patience doesn’t mean letting a bad fit linger. It means not pulling the plug before someone has had a real chance to succeed, while maintaining honest, ongoing communication about what’s working and what isn’t.
The 46% Doesn’t Have to Be You
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