Retained executive search, with culture and work personality assessed before the search starts
The calls that land with a People consultant or a fractional People leader. Each one is easier to answer with a measured baseline in hand.
You can see what is wrong with a leadership team inside a week. Then a board member asks how you know, and the honest answer is twenty years of pattern recognition and a round of interviews.
The United States Office of Personnel Management notes that the loose, conversational interview is highly subjective and damages the reliability and validity of what it concludes.
Source: US Office of Personnel Management, Structured Interviews: A Practical Guide
Before the real work starts you run interviews, sit in meetings and read whatever survey the client already has. By the time you can name the problem, a good part of the budget has gone on finding it.
Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement between business units, so the problem sits team by team, and a handful of interviews reaches a handful of teams.
You raise culture and the finance lead hears a values poster. Without a number beside it, your recommendation competes with every line item in the budget that has one.
A toxic corporate culture is the strongest predictor of attrition, and 10 times more important than pay in predicting turnover.
Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation
The client asks whether the work changed anything. There is no baseline to measure against, so the follow-up is another round of interviews and another opinion, yours included.
Global employee engagement sat at 20% in 2025, down on the year before, after two decades of organisations surveying harder than ever.
What goes wrong for a search or agency recruiter when fit is a judgement call and the client wants proof.
The resume matched and the interviews went well. In month four the client rings to say it is not working, and you run the search again under guarantee for a fee you already banked.
Across more than 20,000 new hires, 46% failed within 18 months, and 89% of those failures came down to attitude rather than technical skill.
You back the person who looks wrong on paper because you have seen enough searches to know. The client wants to see the reasoning, and all you can offer is your track record and a feeling.
93% of talent acquisition professionals say accurately assessing a candidate's skills improves quality of hire, and 61% believe AI can improve how they measure it.
The brief describes the role. It says little about how the team works or where the founder wants the culture to go, so a candidate who fits the brief can still walk into the wrong room.
Only 20% of employees strongly agree they feel connected to their organisation's culture, measured in May 2026.
When the placement is done, the client keeps the person and you keep nothing. The next brief opens from zero against every other firm, and the only things left to compare are fee and speed.
13% of recruiting employers used a recruitment agency in 2025, against 58% who went straight to an online job board.
Source: Jobs and Skills Australia, REOS spotlight: methods and successful methods of recruitment, 2026
I love hard facts, I love data, I love something to fall back on in terms of here are some reasons why. That's what I love about using Compono.
Richard Dunks, Co-founder, New Horizon Solutions
Twenty minutes with Justin Coutts, our Head of Talent Solutions. He will ask how you work with clients and tell you which way of partnering fits, or whether neither does.
Justin CouttsHead of Talent Solutions. Your contact for partnering with Compono.
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