What Are You Actually Paying For?

When I started in executive search nearly 21 years ago, the economics were simple and the logic was sound. Search firms charged 30% or more of a candidate's first-year salary and any fixed incentives. The partner I supported would walk into a business development meeting armed with two things: a foot-high stack of business cards back in the office and an intimate knowledge of his own network. He'd talk about exclusive access to candidates, relationships other firms simply didn't have, and a proprietary database built over years of painstaking market intelligence, near daily after work dinners, drinks and late evening calls. Clients never pushed back on the fees. Why would they? What was the alternative?

Most organisations at the time couldn't name the entire C-suite of their closest competitor, let alone go out into the market and systematically identify, approach, and close multiple A-grade candidates for a critical role. They didn't have the time, the access, or the networks. HR was a nowhere near what it is today, and talent acquisition as a dedicated function barely existed. The term wasn't widely used until the late 1990s and didn't become mainstream until the mid-2000s. Executive search firms filled a genuine and significant gap. Clients paid the fee, we did the rest. It was a fair exchange.

The question nobody in the industry seems willing to ask out loud now is this: what happens when the thing you're selling is no longer scarce?

The World Changed. The Model Didn't.

The candidate access argument, which was the cornerstone of retained search for decades, has been comprehensively undermined.

LinkedIn, Google, and a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI-powered sourcing tools mean that every search consultant on earth now has access to virtually every senior professional on the planet. The idea of a global firm maintaining geographically exclusive talent relationships is, to put it plainly, a fiction. A boutique firm in Sydney has the same candidate reach as a firm with 68 offices in 40 countries. The database advantage, the global footprint, the proprietary network: genuine differentiators in 2000. Not in 2026.

There's something else worth saying about global firms and candidate access that rarely comes up at the pitch stage. The larger the firm, the more extensive their off-limits agreements. Candidates from current or recent clients can't be approached. At the biggest firms, this quietly removes a significant slice of the available market before a search has even begun.

Meanwhile, the fee structure has barely moved. In Australia, a senior retained search run by a SHREK Firm (Spencer Stuart, Heidrick & Struggles, Russell Reynolds, Egon Zehnder and Korn Ferry) runs at anywhere from 28 to 35% of total remuneration. For a $500,000 executive, that's between $140,000 and $175,000 AUD in search fees alone. Assessment and transition coaching, where they're offered at all, are typically sold as separate add-on engagements. The total effective spend for a single senior appointment lands somewhere between $200,000 and $260,000 AUD, spread across multiple teams, with no single party accountable for the outcome. Oh, and lets not forget the admin fee. These can run up to 12% of the fee in Australia. I believe they can be as high as 15% in other geographies.

The pitch has evolved cosmetically. The model hasn't.

The Partner Workload Problem

This is something the industry doesn't discuss openly, and I say it as someone who has spent more than two decades inside it.

The partner I supported early in my career had a golden rule he rarely broke: never work on more than four searches at a time, five at an absolute stretch. His reasoning was simple. Beyond that threshold, quality degrades. Clients stop getting real attention. The search becomes a process rather than a partnership.

That standard is now largely incompatible with the commercial realities of the large global firms. Partners are routinely carrying ten, twelve, fifteen concurrent mandates. Not because they want to, but because the business model demands growth, and growth means volume. More mandates. Faster turnarounds. Bigger books of business.

I once heard a senior partner at a large firm describe what he called an accepted failure rate of 20%. When I asked what drove those failures, his answer was telling: it was usually the easier searches, the less demanding clients, the ones who didn't push or call as often. The clients who trusted the process most were the ones who got the least attention.

That's not a character flaw. It's a structural incentive problem. When a partner's compensation is tied to how much business they generate rather than how well they execute what they already have, commercial pressure wins. Every time.

I recently had a conversation with the Lead Partner of an Australian PE Firm, who had this to say, "I've used the globals for years. Lately though, I'm just not impressed. going to a global search firm was like using McKinsey for a strategy engagement - no-one ever got fired for hiring McKinsey." Much like using McKinsey, that sentiment, meant as a joke, is probably much truer than it was in the past.

What the Research Actually Says

The data is more uncomfortable than most clients realise.

According to research from the Executive Search Information Exchange, up to 40% of retained searches fail to place a candidate at all. Of those that do result in a hire, between 30 and 50% of those leaders will fail within 18 months of appointment. The exact figure varies depending on how failure is defined, but the consistency across multiple independent sources is hard to ignore.

What's less often discussed is why they fail.

The causes are surprisingly consistent. Around 75% of senior leadership failures are linked to cultural fit breakdown. About 52% involve the leader's inability to build the relationships needed to be effective. Only a minority are rooted in technical capability or functional competence. In most cases, the person could do the job. What they couldn't do was adapt, connect, and embed themselves in a way that allowed them to perform.

This points to a specific and largely unaddressed flaw in the traditional search model.

Academic research by Monika Hamori found that headhunters tend to select candidates based on visible proxies: job titles, pedigree, brand-name employers, and general availability. Candidates who are willing to move are overrepresented in the pool, and they tend to come from less successful firms with shorter average tenure. In short, the selection process is optimised for accessibility rather than the qualities that actually predict long-term leadership success (Learning agility, cognitive flexibility, emotional regulation and feedback responsiveness)

There's also consistent evidence that external hires underperform internal ones. External appointments produce worse financial outcomes on average, and a key reason is information asymmetry. Boards and hiring teams lack the deep contextual knowledge of external candidates needed to make truly informed decisions. They're working from interviews, references, and surface indicators, and are, as one researcher put it, unknowingly missing critical information about the people they're appointing.

The cost of getting it wrong is substantial. Conservative estimates put the cost of a failed senior hire at three times annual salary. When fully loaded, including lost productivity, team disruption, strategic delay, and the cost of a replacement search, the figure can reach twenty times total compensation. For a $500,000 executive, that's a potential downside that makes a $200,000 search fee look like a rounding error.

And yet the process used to make that decision hasn't materially changed in a generation.

We've Been Solving the Wrong Problem

Here's the line I keep coming back to, because it captures something the industry hasn't been honest about:

Executive search has spent decades solving an access problem that largely no longer exists, while making almost no progress on the judgment problem that actually matters.

Finding candidates isn't the hard part anymore. It hasn't been for some time. The hard part, and it has always been the hard part, is knowing enough about a candidate to make a genuinely informed judgment about whether they'll succeed in a specific role, at a specific moment, in a specific organisation.

The research is clear on what drives that judgment. It's not a candidate's CV. It's their capacity to adapt, build relationships in an unfamiliar environment, handle complexity they haven't previously encountered, and stay effective under the particular pressures of a new role. These things are measurable. They're just not easy to assess through interviews and references alone. And they're almost never the primary focus of a traditional retained search.

The Integration Gap Nobody Wants to Own

A well-run search generates a genuinely detailed picture of a candidate: their strengths, their blind spots, the conditions under which they perform best, the contexts in which they're most likely to struggle. In the traditional model, that intelligence ends up in a final candidate report. The client reads it, files it, and the search firm moves on to the next mandate.

The new leader walks into the role without a structured transition plan anchored in what the search process actually discovered about them. The board and leadership team manage the integration with the same limited information they had at the start.

Research suggests that structured onboarding and integration support can reduce the risk of leadership failure by around 30%. That's not a marginal improvement. It's a material reduction in one of the most significant risks a board faces. It's left almost entirely to chance in the standard model.

The industry has long described its ambition as being stewards of the next generation of leadership for clients. It's a compelling idea. The gap between that aspiration and a model that closes at appointment, because that's where the invoice ends, has never been properly addressed.

A Different Way

The future of executive search isn't faster sourcing or bigger databases. Those arguments have run their course.

It's a genuine partnership model: one team, connected across the full arc of an appointment, with a fee structure that reflects accountability for outcomes rather than activities.

At Vantyr Group, we've built our service around three integrated phases, delivered sequentially by the same team, priced as a single engagement from day one.

Executive Search. Evidence-based candidate identification and evaluation. Not a database search. A genuine market assessment built around the specific complexity of the role, the organisation's context, and the leadership qualities needed not just for today but for the demands ahead - and given the ambiguity that exists in today's world, those demands will shift in real-time!

Leadership Assessment. Rigorous evaluation of leadership and growth capacity using validated tools with strong predictive validity. We're not just asking whether a candidate can do the job as described. We're asking whether they have the cognitive and leadership headroom to grow with the role as complexity, scale, and ambition increase. That's a different question and it requires a different methodology. It's also, as the research consistently shows, a far better predictor of whether a leader will ultimately succeed or fail.

Executive Coaching. Structured integration support across the first six to twelve months in role. The insights generated during assessment become the foundation of a personalised transition plan. We stay connected to the leader and to the organisation through the period when most appointments are actually won or lost.

Three phases. One team. One fixed fee: one third at engagement, one third at shortlist, one third when the coaching concludes. Not paid in full before your new leader has walked through the door. Paid as the work is actually delivered.

That final payment milestone matters more than it might appear. It means our commercial interest is aligned with your outcome, not with the moment of appointment. That's what skin in the game actually looks like.

And the total cost? Less than what most firms charge for the search alone.

Why This Matters Now

I want to be clear. I'm not writing this to attack an industry I've spent my career in. The large global search firms built something remarkable, and at their best, they still do excellent work.

But the model they built was designed for a world where candidate access was genuinely scarce, where in-house talent functions didn't exist, and where appointment was a reasonable finish line. That world is gone.

We know why senior leadership appointments fail. We've known for some time. The causes are consistent, well-documented, and in large part preventable, or at the least reducable. The industry just hasn't restructured around that knowledge.

Organisations that continue to treat executive search as a transactional, placement-only engagement aren't just paying for something that's been commoditised. They're carrying a level of leadership risk that, in many cases, they simply can't afford.

The boards, CEOs, and leadership teams we speak to who have worked this out aren't looking for a search firm. They're looking for a partner who will be as invested in the outcome as they are.

That's what Vantyr Group was built to be.

Vantyr Group is a leadership capital advisory firm that helps organisations appoint and integrate senior leaders for critical roles, through executive search, growth-capacity assessment, and transition coaching. If you're navigating a senior appointment where the margin for error is thin, we'd like to have that conversation.