According to Simon Mullins, Facilitator at ESIX: Executive Search Information Exchange, 40% of executive searches fail. Client companies are to blame for 70% of these failures, due to a lack of proper management by the hiring organization.
However, members of ESIX are actively managing their executive recruiting activities in order to cut failures by half and reduce cycle times by a third.
In this article, Simon Mullins explains in a detailed way that the kick-off meeting and the position description are the best tools to avoid failures – below is just a taster, I highly recommend reading the whole article!
Though we might think of them as rudimentary, two of our best tools are those we sometimes seem to short-change the most – the kick-off meeting, and the position description. The kick-off meeting is the first stage of the consultative relationship, a critical opportunity to get everything on the table and set everyone’s expectations. Similarly, the position description is either given scant attention by everyone and is just another item to check off and shelve, or worse, the client is allowed to shirk their responsibilities and gets the recruiter to do it all, because it’s chalked up as “one of those HR processes.”
https://www.execunet.com/40-executive-searches-fail/
