The Expensive Headline – Failed Senior Hire

Guest: Logan Yonavjak

Every failed senior hire eventually becomes public, whether it’s a resignation "to pursue other opportunities," or a restructuring. Sometimes the news makes headlines. But the failure almost never starts when it surfaces. It likely started months earlier, in a selection process that measured the wrong things, usually involving an interview process that went beautifully.

The numbers deserve more attention than they get. Corporate Executive Board research puts executive failure at 50–70% within eighteen months of entering a new role. And when hires fail, it's rarely about competence: across 20,000 hires tracked by Leadership IQ, 89% of failures were attitudinal and interpersonal; only 11% were technical. We aren't losing leaders to skill gaps. We're losing them to everything interviews are the worst at seeing.

What interviews miss. By the time someone is a serious candidate for a senior role, they're probably excellent at interviews. Interviews reward narrative fluency, preparation, and polish, all qualities that correlate with seniority but aren't necessarily "readiness" or "capacity" for the job.

Meanwhile, unstructured conversation is where bias works unsupervised: affinity bias ("reminds me of me"), halo effect (one impressive strength colors everything), and confirmation bias (we hear whatever supports the gut call we made in the first five minutes).

Six shifts for a fairer senior read. What rarely appears consistently in a rehearsed hour is capacity. What this person actually does with feedback, with pressure, with decisions where the data doesn't decide. Here are six practical shifts that can surface it.

1. Read real work, not rehearsed accounts. With the candidate's knowledge and consent, look at how they actually operate: board updates, town halls, the Q&A after a plan went sideways. Real work is far harder to polish than an interview answer, and fairer than a gut impression.

2. Apply the same lens to every candidate. Bias thrives on inconsistency. Define the capacities the role demands before you meet anyone, then evaluate every candidate against the same questions, the same way. Structure is the most evidence-backed bias reducer in selection.

3. For coachability, watch what they do with feedback about them. Not their work, but them. Ask about a time they received uncomfortable personal feedback. Curiosity is a signal. A fluent explanation of why the feedback was wrong is also a signal.

4. For resilience, listen to how they narrate setbacks. Who else is in the story? Leaders who describe failure with other people accurately, including people they disagreed with, recover and learn differently from leaders whose stories have one hero and a lot of background scenery.

5. For decision-making, count what they can hold. Have them walk through a decision where the data didn't decide. How many competing considerations stayed alive before collapsing into one simple story? Senior roles are made of exactly those decisions.

6. Keep the human decision human. Whatever you learn, whether from interviews, references, assessments, or real work, treat it as one input among several, reviewed by people. No process should hand you a verdict on a person, and no vendor should claim theirs does.

The tools are catching up. The measurement gap is closing. The leading indicator is leadership capacity. Readiness Engine, has partnered with analytics firm Stealth Dog Labs to connect the two: what a leader's real work reveals, and how organizations perform over time.

With the leader's knowledge and consent, their real work is used to build an evidence-backed picture of capacities like coachability, resilience, and complexity-holding, grounded in fifty years of developmental and leadership science. This provides an understanding that doubles as a development map — for the leader you select, and for the strong candidate not ready yet, which is how you keep them and improve retention and employee morale.

Selection done this way does more than avoid the expensive headline. It builds the bench that prevents the next one.

To learn more

Logan Yonavjak is co-founder and CEO of Readiness Engine, which reads leadership capacity from how leaders actually show up in real work. Learn more at readinessengine.io, follow Readiness Engine on LinkedIn, or connect with Logan on LinkedIn.