When an appointment goes wrong, I sometimes put the file back on the table. Almost always, it turns out the signs were already there. Not as a warning in red letters, but as a series of small signals that were noticed at the time and never spoken aloud: a responsibility that sounds bigger on the CV than it really was, a departure that was never quite explained, a referee who was warm about the person and vague about the results.
Sometimes it is even clearer. The signal has been voiced, it is set out in black and white in an assessment and the appointment goes ahead anyway. This piece is about one such case.
The signal was on the table
On an assignment for a media company, I was searching for an operations director. Like the rest of the sector, the organisation had several years behind it in which societal issues had dominated the conversation. The management wanted change, so the assignment was not purely operational. A team had to be brought along on a course that was still taking shape.
After several rounds of interviews I put forward three candidates. One of them stood out on qualifications and experience. From the outset I pointed out to the management what had struck me in the interviews: a very strong personality which, in this organisation and at this moment, would not help the team move forward. The assessment confirmed that picture.
Extensive discussions with the management followed. The decision still fell on this candidate. Within eighteen months he had to step down: his approach backfired within the organisation. I write that without any satisfaction. Being proved right after the fact is worth nothing to anyone: not to the client, not to the team and certainly not to the person concerned.
Why gut feeling wins
What happens in processes like this is rarely a lack of information. It is a form of optimism. A committee that wants a candidate reads the file as confirmation rather than as a test. The convincing foreground gets all the attention, what lies behind it is registered but not weighed. That is human. In a selection process, it is also expensive.
An assessment does not solve that by itself. In the case above, the outcome was simply on the table. The instrument did what it was meant to do and the decision passed it by. The real question, then, is not whether you commission an assessment, but how much weight you give its outcome when it runs against your preference.
What a wrong appointment costs
In my experience, a failed appointment at director level quickly costs two to five times the annual salary once you count everything: the severance, a new search, the period in which an interim fills the gaps and the months in which a successor has to settle in all over again. That is an estimate from practice, not a research finding; the exact sum differs from one organisation to the next.
The heaviest part does not appear in the budget. Eighteen months in which a team relates mainly to its new leader rather than to the work. A change that stalls or moves in the wrong direction. And a board that has to explain why it went ahead. Research published this month in the Strategic Management Journal shows that dismissing a chief executive damages a company’s reputation, even after controlling for financial performance. The damage is greater the more standing the departing executive had. The study concerns the CEO, but I recognise the mechanism one layer down as well: reversing an appointment shows that the earlier judgement was wrong.
In the market I often hear that thirty to fifty percent of appointments at this level fail within eighteen months. I have not come across a conclusive primary source for that figure, so I cite it with caution. In our own files the percentage is ten to twelve percent, according to recent internal research covering more than a hundred placements over the past ten years. I attribute that difference to the work done before a candidate is put forward.
What happens before the shortlist
Selection research is fairly clear on this. A major reanalysis of decades of studies, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2022, ranks the structured interview first as a predictor of job performance, with a corrected validity of 0.42. A test of cognitive ability comes out at 0.31 in the same analysis. A well-built interview, in other words, is not a soft complement to a hard measurement. It is the strongest instrument in its own right.
At Fornell Human Capital we therefore combine several interviews with an assessment. We start with what we call the candidate’s DNA review: an exploration focused on the role profile, on the goals the management wants to see achieved within a set period and on how they should be achieved. Alongside this, an online assessment takes place with open questions, the outcome of which is set against the role profile. Together this produces a very detailed picture.
We discuss that picture at length with the candidate first and only then does it go into the presentation to the client. That is how we ensure the judgement is formed independently, before anyone on the client side sees it.
Giving the dissenting view a place
The decision stays with the client, as it should. What you can organise is that the dissenting view carries weight. Give one person at the table the explicit task of setting out what speaks against the preferred candidate and rotate that task. Not because that person is right, but because the question has at least been asked. And agree in advance what you will do with a finding you do not like. After the final round, that is no longer an agreement but a negotiation with yourself.
If you want to appoint a candidate despite a reservation, you can do so responsibly with a ‘yes, provided that’. That means naming the reservation, setting down what is needed in the first months to absorb it and agreeing when you will look back together. An appointment without those conditions is a gamble presented as a decision.
In the end this is a governance question, not an HR matter. In its report on the 2024 financial year, the Dutch Corporate Governance Code Monitoring Committee found that one third of respondents do not involve an external expert in their evaluation and that supervisory board reports are mainly procedural rather than substantive. A board that tests itself mainly on process will soon test an appointment the same way.
From the other side of the table
A mismatch does not only cost the organisation. The executive who leaves after eighteen months takes a story along that has to be explained in every subsequent interview and that story is rarely told in his favour. I therefore advise candidates not to treat the outcome of an assessment as a hurdle to clear, but as information for themselves. Do you recognise yourself in the picture and does that picture fit what this organisation needs in the years ahead? Ask the committee what it expects of you in the first eighteen months and above all how. A role for which you are superbly qualified on paper can still be the wrong one right now.
In closing
Assessment or gut feeling is really a false choice. Every appointment contains an element of feeling and rightly so: trust cannot be measured completely. But a feeling that drowns out a finding instead of weighing it is no longer a judgement. It is hope. At Fornell Human Capital we put on the table what we see, even when it is not what you hoped to hear. What you do with it remains your decision.