The first 90 days are part of the brief

A senior hire that's right on paper can still fail. Industry data on senior-hire failure rates ranges from 30% to 50% depending on what counts as failure and how long you measure for. Our own follow-up data over the last three years sits around 18% — most of which is concentrated in the first 90 days.

That's not coincidence. The first 90 days are when:

• The hire makes their first reading of internal politics and decides who their allies are.
• The CEO either does or doesn't make room for the new hire to take real authority.
• The senior team either does or doesn't accept the hire as legitimate.
• The hire's family decides whether the geography is actually liveable.
• The first board meeting confirms or undermines the hire's read on the company.

All five of these can be supported. None of them are usually mentioned in the search brief.

What we now bake into the engagement

Three things, all unpaid additions to the standard retained mandate:

1. 30-day check-in. Confidential call with the hire (without the CEO). What's harder than they expected. What surprised them. What they'd want to surface to the CEO if they could do it indirectly.
2. 60-day calibration. Three short calls — hire, CEO, one senior peer — on the same questions, looking for alignment or drift.
3. 90-day written debrief. Short written summary to the CEO and chair on integration status, with named risks and recommended interventions. Typically half a page.

This isn't coaching, and it isn't HR. It's the search firm staying close enough to surface integration risks while they're still cheap to fix.

The pattern we see most often

The most common 90-day risk is not the hire — it's the CEO not making room. The hire's job is to take real authority over their function. The CEO's job is to actually hand it over, with all the symbolic and practical signals that implies. When the handover doesn't happen, the hire spends 90 days running into walls and the company concludes the hire was wrong.

If we catch this at 30 days, it's a 30-minute conversation with the CEO. If we catch it at 90, it's usually too late.

The brief isn't done when the offer's signed. The brief is done when the hire is integrated. We treat those as the same job.

What this means for fees

We don't bill separately for the 90-day work — it's part of the retained engagement. The cost is absorbed because the alternative — a 30% failed-hire rate — is structurally bad for everyone, including us.

If you're briefing a senior search and want this kind of integration support to be part of it from day one, that's the engagement we run. Send two or three lines on the seat.