EXECUTIVE ONBOARDING SLASHES FAILURE RATE
The Board of Directors has completed a rigorous search. Your new CEO has got her family photo on the
desk. How long are you willing to give her to show results?
Not long? The 90-day “honeymoon” gets shorter and shorter. A change in CEO very often means a
problem unresolved and the Board wants to see results, fast. The resulting pressure can be very costly.
A recent Financial Times article reports that 40% of new senior executive hires fail within 18 months.
And it is not just time that has been wasted or a career damaged. According to George Bradt, a failed
$500K executive can cost his or her company $5 million in combined hard and soft costs.
Bradt is considered the guru of Executive Onboarding, a very specialized and fast-growing niche of the
executive search industry. Onboarding is a process meant to ensure that leaders adapt and become full
contributors to the organization twice as fast and with fewer problems.
“Successful onboarding can slash that failure rate, “ says Bradt. “Since 2003, 90% of executives we’ve
helped were still in place or promoted at 18 months. In other words, we’ve cut that 40% failure rate to
10%.”
Bradt’s company, PrimeGenesis, is part of the worldwide Cornerstone International Group of executive
search and HR specialists and delivers the Group’s onboarding offer through offices in New York,
London, Tokyo, Chicago, Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Mumbai. He has just returned from a successful
tour in Asia, conducting Cornerstone International Group workshops in Malaysia, Singapore and India in
conjunction with the local Cornerstone offices.
“Too many companies approach executive level replacements as a plug ‘n play process,” says
Bradt. “When the honeymoon period is over, there are a dozen reasons why the company is unhappy
and the new hire disillusioned. And it’s nearly always unnecessary.”
With Executive Onboarding, a skilled team helps the new leader to set goals for the first 100 days, align
his or her team with the goals, develops peer relationships and a communications strategy. The most
is made of the “pre-boarding” period – the time between accepting the job and starting it — to have at
least a business direction in place the first day on the job.
A companion workshop for corporate hiring managers applies onboarding concepts to enhance the
recruiting, hiring and accelerating of new hires from an internal perspective and get employees up to
speed in half the time.
“The process of hiring and accelerating new talent is changing rapidly,” says William Guy, Chairman and
CEO of Cornerstone International Group. “Companies today look to their recruiting partners for help in
a variety of specialized niches such as executive onboarding.
“We feel very fortunate in having PrimeGenesis on the team. Our goal is to offer best-of-breed
solutions in any niche and George brings that with his specialized trainers, tools and 10 years of
experience.”
For more information:
George Bradt
Managing Director, PrimeGenesis
Cornerstone Executive Onboarding Division
+1-203-323-8501 office
+1-203-253-1569 cell
gbradt@primegenesis.com.com