Methodology

Why we redesigned the executive hiring process

14 Jun 2026

Executive hiring fails about 25% of the time. The cost per failed hire runs past 200% of annual salary. Across Europe’s 2,000 largest corporates, that adds up to roughly CHF 875M of avoidable cost every year.

The science to prevent this has existed since the 1990s. Industrial and organizational psychology settled the question decades ago. Structured interviewing, evidence-based scoring, and observation-level data produce dramatically better outcomes than the alternatives. Executive hiring has largely ignored it.

Kettrion is the infrastructure that makes the existing science impossible to bypass.

What the research says

Three findings shaped the redesign:

Structured interviews outperform unstructured interviews by more than 2:1 in predictive validity. Sackett and colleagues’ 2022 meta-analysis ranked 22 selection criteria by predictive power. The factors organizations rely on most — years of experience chief among them — ranked near the bottom. Structure, scoring rubrics, and standardized questions ranked at the top. (Sackett et al., 2022 [EN])

The signals that predict executive failure are invisible to CV review. The Center for Creative Leadership ran a 40-year derailment study tracking executives who failed post-hire. The conclusion was unequivocal. Failed executives are largely indistinguishable from successful ones at the point of selection — on paper. The signals that matter — interpersonal behavior under pressure, adaptability, team trust — are only detectable through structured behavioral observation. (CCL Derailment Study [EN])

Interviewers disagree more than organizations realize. Daniel Kahneman’s work on noise found that two interviewers on the same panel disagree on who to hire about a quarter of the time — for reasons unrelated to the candidate. Mood, sequence, hunger, the person interviewed just before. Structure does not eliminate human judgment. It eliminates the conditions that produce that variance. (Kahneman, Sibony & Sunstein, 2021 [EN])

What this implies

The implication is uncomfortable for an industry built on CV review and unstructured conversation. The methods most commonly used to hire executives are the methods the evidence rejects most clearly.

We experienced this for 12 years; the same patterns repeated across executive search projects. Panels that disagreed without knowing why. Decisions that drifted toward whoever spoke first or last. Confident predictions that did not hold up 18 months later. The methodology to fix it was on the shelf and we employed excel and paper versions of it. More advanced software was not available.

What Kettrion changes

Kettrion encodes a practitioner-validated workflow into software. Every interview is structured. Every assessment is captured as a discrete, timestamped, source-attributed observation. Every score is anchored to a behavioral anchor, not an impression.

The output is not a database. It is a corpus — an observation-layer data model that compounds with use. Every mandate makes the next one sharper. The Head of TA or the CHRO sees the full evidence chain behind every recommendation.

Kettrion builds the architecture that makes the existing science operational.

What the CHRO gets

Confidence in the decision. A documented, sourced, audit-ready record that explains why this candidate, on this evidence, for this role.

Under the EU AI Act, the right to explanation is no longer optional. The Article 86 requirement means any high-risk hiring system must surface the reasoning behind its outputs. Kettrion was designed to that standard from the outset, not retrofitted around it.

The methodology is the moat. The corpus is the asset. The CHRO’s confidence is the deliverable.

Sources

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