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I have spent most of my working life around executive hiring, and there is a pattern I have watched play out more times than I can count.

A company decides it needs a leader. A regional VP. A head of operations. Someone to own a category that has been drifting for two quarters longer than anyone wants to admit. The search kicks off. Resumes come in. A short list forms. Everyone gravitates toward the candidate who interviews well and looks the part, the one who says the right things in the room and has the logos on the resume that make the decision feel safe. An offer goes out. The seat gets filled. And the organization exhales, because the hard part is finally over.

Except it is not over. It is barely the beginning.

Here is the number that I keep coming back to. According to the University of South Carolina’s Center for Executive Succession, more than 40% of externally hired executives are gone within 18 months, either because they walked or because they were asked to. Sit with that for a second. Almost half. Not entry-level roles, not seasonal hires, but the senior leaders that companies spend months and serious money to bring in. The people who are supposed to set direction and steady the ship are, more often than a coin flip would predict, no longer there a year and a half later.

When I show that figure to a CEO or a board member, the first reaction is usually disbelief, followed by a quiet recalculation as they think about the last two or three senior hires they made. The number stops being abstract pretty quickly.

Where It Actually BreaksA Failure of Fit, Not a Failure of Search

So why does it happen? After enough years, I have stopped blaming the candidates. Most of them are talented, serious people who took a role in good faith. The failure almost always traces back to the same root, and it is not a failure of the search. It is a failure of fit. We have built an entire hiring culture around the resume and the interview, two of the least reliable predictors of whether a leader will actually hold up inside a specific company, with a specific team, at a specific moment in that company’s life. A candidate can be excellent and still be wrong for you. The interview rewards polish. The job rewards judgment under pressure. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most senior hires quietly come apart.

The Real MathWhat the Gap Actually Costs

The cost of that gap is not theoretical, and it is not small. Industry data puts the cost of executive turnover at up to 213% of the position’s annual salary once you account for the full picture.

The real damage is everything underneath. Strategy stalls for a year while the seat sits empty or occupied by the wrong person. Momentum that took eighteen months to build evaporates.

And here is the one that hurts the most: your strongest people start looking around, because nothing demoralizes a high performer faster than watching the wrong person get placed above them. You do not just lose the hire. You lose the bench you already had.

Even the conservative numbers tell the same story. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that a bad hire costs at least 30% of that employee’s first-year earnings, and that is the floor, the most charitable accounting you can do. It only climbs as you move up the org chart. There is no version of this math where getting it wrong is cheap. The only honest question is how much of the outcome you are willing to leave to chance.

What Beats the OddsDiscipline, Not Luck

I am not writing this to scare anyone. I am writing it because I believe the failure rate is not inevitable, and the firms that consistently beat it are not lucky. They are disciplined. They treat a senior hire as a search that has to hold, not a seat that has to be filled. That distinction sounds small. It changes everything about how the work gets done.

It means doing more work before the offer than after it. It means understanding the team a leader is walking into, as well as how you understand the leader. It means being honest with both sides about what the role actually demands, including the parts that are hard to say out loud, instead of selling a version of the job that does not exist. And it means staying in the relationship long enough, after the handshake, to know whether the match actually took, rather than declaring victory at the signed offer and moving on.

In our world, the stakes for building materials are sharper than most. The right regional VP can define a market for a decade. The right category director can turn a flat line into the best-performing segment in the company. And the wrong one, in either seat, can cost you years you do not get back. These are not interchangeable hires. They are the decisions that determine which direction the whole business moves.

That is the work we do, and it is the only way I know to do it well. If you have a leadership seat coming open, or one you are quietly worried about, talk to us before the search begins. The conversation that prevents a bad hire is worth more than any search that produces one.