According to Dr. Dave Popple, Managing Partner at Psynet Group, even the best recruiters share a blind spot. Here is how he explains it.
The recruiters I know have become very good at assessing talent. Most take the time to understand their clients, and years of interviews have sharpened their intuition.
That story, however, describes tens of thousands of recruiters. The United States has approximately 264,000 of them. A 2015 LinkedIn analysis found that the average recruiter had 10 years of experience, and I suspect that number has only grown. Recruiters are good at their jobs, yet skill alone does not set any one of them apart.
Even the best recruiters still miss. In my experience, the main reason is simple: many people interview better than they perform. Most candidates can present well for a limited time. It often takes six months for their true colors to show.
When I spoke with Kevin Kelly, former CEO of Heidrick & Struggles and a friend of Psynet Group, he referred me to a Heidrick & Struggles study in which 40% of executive hires were gone after 18 months. Working backward from that figure, I estimate that 10% to 20% of recruiting placements fail within the first year. Kevin and I agreed on the cause. Recruiters want to see the best in their candidates, candidates are excellent interviewers, and together they create the perfect storm for an overly optimistic placement.
How much is lost in replacement time and client trust when an overly optimistic placement fails?
40%
Of senior executive hires pushed out, failed, or quit within 18 months
6–12 mo
The typical replacement guarantee on a retained search
213%
Of annual salary: the estimated cost of replacing a senior executive
Sources: Heidrick & Struggles internal study via Adsum Insights; Hyring and Hunter Recruiting; Center for American Progress via Pinnacle Search.
The Research
Interviewers are becoming worse, not better.
Senior candidates have spent years in high-stakes meetings. They read rooms, tell a coherent story about themselves, and hire coaches to prepare them for interviews. They reached this level partly because they know how to sell themselves. The interviewer starts at a disadvantage.
In their widely cited 1998 meta-analysis, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter estimated the predictive validity of structured interviews at .51 and unstructured interviews at .38. Have we become better at interviewing since 1998? The evidence I see points the other way. A 2022 reanalysis by Sackett and colleagues lowered those estimates to .42 and .19.
Well-prepared candidates explain part of the decline. I believe the rest comes from what interviewers look for. Recruiters and hiring managers assess technical skills well, yet failed hires rarely lack them. Leadership IQ tracked more than 20,000 new hires and found that 46 percent failed within 18 months. More striking, 89 percent of those failures stemmed from attitudinal factors, the very factors Psybil uncovers better than any other assessment on the market.
In the full Recruiting Partner Brief
Part I · The Partnership
Five ways a Psybil partnership strengthens your firm.
Part II · In Your Searches
How Psybil works inside the process you already run.
Part III · Fit
Whether a partnership is right for your firm.
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