The second attempt, when the first hire fails inside 90 days.

1Data: 46% fail within 18 months

The Leadership IQ study "Why New Hires Fail" tracked 5,247 hiring managers across 312 organisations over three years; together they were responsible for more than 20,000 hires. The result: 46% of new hires fail within 18 months, only 19% are considered clearly successful. 89% of failures trace back to attitude and behaviour, only 11% to functional gaps.¹

Despite the frequency, failed hires are rarely discussed openly. A failed senior hire gets internally logged as an individual error - either "wrong candidate" or "wrong hiring manager". Rarely is it recognised as a systemic briefing failure.

2The honest diagnosis: person or briefing?

When a critical hire fails within the first 90 to 365 days, the most important question before the second attempt is not "who was the wrong person?", but: "was it the wrong person, or was it the wrong briefing?"

From 200+ HIHB workshops and the analysis of failed mandates, a distribution emerges that aligns well with Leadership IQ's:

• Roughly 30% of failed hires are "wrong person" - the candidate had functional or cultural gaps that should have shown up in the recruiting process.
• Roughly 70% are "wrong briefing" - the person was functionally suitable, but the role was unclear in the briefing. Whatever the person did, they could not be successful.

Anyone launching a second recruiting cycle without this diagnosis will, with high probability, repeat the first error - only with a different person and different costs.

3Three diagnostic questions before the second attempt

Question 1: Which of the five failure modes was unclear at the first attempt?

Evaluator gap (no clear assessor), breakpoints (no "what must not happen"), stakeholders (invisible stakeholders ignored), persona (requirements list instead of persona), 90-day plan (no early-warning system). Which of these was not systematically clarified in the first briefing? Usually it is not one, but two or three.

Question 2: Which invisible stakeholders blocked success?

After the first hire ends, it often becomes visible which person - not in the hiring loop - blocked the role (see The invisible stakeholder). That person must be identified and engaged before the second attempt, or they will block the second person too.

Question 3: What did the person concretely try that did not work?

Where possible, run an honest exit interview with the first person. Which of their expectations went unmet? Where did they invest energy that did not yield outcomes? That information is gold for the second briefing. It is frequently (often very frequently) not collected, because the parting conversation ends too quickly.

4Timing: why a 4 to 6 week minimum pause

The natural reaction after a failed hire is to launch the next search immediately: the position is open, the pressure is high, the stakeholders are asking. That reaction is understandable and, in most cases, wrong.

Recommended timing for the second attempt:

• 2 to 3 weeks of diagnosis: with all stakeholders, ideally externally facilitated, working through the three diagnostic questions. Output: honest failure-mode analysis.
• 1 to 2 weeks for a new briefing: HIHB 5C workshop with all key stakeholders. This time, with the explicit lessons from the first failure.
• Then restart recruiting: with a clear briefing, identified invisible stakeholders, and a sharpened persona.

In total, 4 to 6 weeks of pause before relaunching recruiting. That feels long. It saves the third recruiting cycle.

5How HIHB works on the second attempt

HIHB workshops in the context of a second attempt carry a particular dynamic: after the first failure, stakeholders are willing to be more honest than they were before the first attempt. Defensive politeness gives way to sober analysis: what was not said the first time?

In that situation, external facilitation of the HIHB Workshop is especially effective. It can pose the diagnostic questions that internal participants would not raise out of loyalty, and put the failure-mode analysis on the table without anyone losing face.

This is exactly where the Leadership IQ insight applies: if 89% of failed hires trace back to attitude and behaviour¹, the lever sits in the briefing, not in sourcing. Persona, evaluator criteria, and breakpoints are the three fields where attitude is described upfront and made testable in the interview.

Empirically, in our own mandates: critical hires re-briefed via an HIHB Workshop after a first failed attempt show meaningfully higher 12-month retention than second attempts without structured failure-mode diagnosis.

Michael von Hirschfeld

Managing Director, HireWorks GmbH · HIHB Workshop facilitator · 200+ workshops

Leads the HIHB methodology at HireWorks. Has facilitated workshops since 2018 with founders, management boards, recruiting teams, and hiring managers across DACH mid-market firms, large corporates, and start-ups.