How to Ensure the Success of a Senior Hire
You can have the best product-market fit, commitment to customer satisfaction, or supply chain management. But if you don’t have the right people to execute your vision, you’ll always be left wondering what’s holding you back.
It’s your job as CEO not only to choose a team of leaders who can bring your vision to life, but also to create the right conditions so they can thrive in their new roles.
In fact, research by Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg, who spoke to 450 CEOs and leaders at the CEO Coaching International 2025 Make BIG Happen Summit, shows that hiring a star performer on their own isn’t enough for them to be successful.
His seminal study examined 1,052 star stock analysts working for 78 investment banks in the United States. What he found was shocking: “46% of the research analysts did poorly in the year after they left one company for another,” he wrote for the Harvard Business Review. “After they switched loyalties, their performance plummeted by an average of about 20% and had not climbed back to the old levels even five years later.”
An executive’s performance depends just as much on the culture, systems, and processes of a business as it does on their innate talent and skills. Finding the right leaders is just one part of the equation.
We spoke to Velveth Schmitz, CEO at HireBetter, a retained talent search agency and a CEO Coaching International Diamond Strategic Partner, to find out how to hire the right people and set them up to thrive when they do arrive.
1. Start with Your Retention Plan
Before making an offer to anyone, you should have a plan in place to help them succeed.
Top performers aren’t just top performers because they’re good at what they do—they’re top performers because their CEO and their team provide the resources they need.
Schmitz says her first question to any client is if they have a retention plan ready to go or not. “I want to know, what is your 30, 60, 90-day plan for this person, and what KPIs you have to measure that success,” she says. “What kind of coaching are they going to have? Our job is to recruit them, but your job is to retain them.”
That includes a structured onboarding plan that sets clear expectations of what success looks like, establishes KPIs to measure that success, and keeps the lines of communication open between the new hire and the rest of the leadership team so they can get the support they need right away.
2. Interview for Leadership Qualities, Not Just Accomplishments
Successful leaders share certain traits in common that extend beyond their functional skill sets.
Look for qualities like:
Visionary and strategic thinking
Emotional intelligence and relationship building
Strong decision-making and problem-solving
Growth mindset and lifelong learners
Proven cultural leadership
Where many hiring managers trip up, says Schmitz, is failing to evaluate these softer skills in the interviewing process. That’s why she recommends incorporating behavioral interviewing (“Tell me about a time when…”), in addition to more traditional Q&A or technical testing.
Questions like these can help you determine whether a candidate possesses the leadership qualities that will make them successful. Example questions might be:
Tell me about a time when you were crystal clear on a decision that needed to be made to drive a particular KPI forward, and a colleague was not on board. What did you do to convince them to come on board, to be part of the solution, and what was the result?
Tell me about a great success story. What contributed to that success?
Tell me about a time when you received some negative feedback about a project you were excited about. How did you move forward?
“The person has to structure a story about the situation, include the methodology they used to attack the situation, and offer their thinking and problem-solving steps, which takes away the ability for anyone just to give back the answers they think you want to hear,” says Schmitz. “Instead, you can dive into the emotional intelligence of the person.”
3. Evaluate Your Organizational Processes
The candidate’s skills are only part of what makes them successful. Think about a great hiring success story—one of your best leaders. Then, think about a time when hiring a leader didn’t work out. What do you think was innate to those people that made them succeed or fail?
As you reflect, you may find that the success story was in spite of the organization, and the failure story was because of the organization.
Your culture matters, and how every manager embodies those values matters. According to Boris Groysburg, “When researchers studied the performance of 2,086 mutual fund managers…they found that 30% of a fund’s performance could be attributed to the individual and 70% was due to the manager’s institution.”
Ask yourself:
What roadblocks and friction exist within our systems and processes that prevent things from getting done? Is there too much process, or is it too open-ended?
Do the mission and vision trickle down beyond the leadership team?
What do alumni say about our organization? What is our brand as a place to work?
“Top performers operate in high-performing environments,” says Schmitz. “If you don’t have a culture and environment where people can succeed, you have to work on that before you try to bring anyone in.”
For more help building a culture that helps your senior talent succeed, reach out to Velveth at HireBetter: https://ceocoachinginternational.com/partners/hire-better/
To download HireBetter’s guide to hiring senior leadership, click here.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, the firm has coached more than 1,500+ CEOs and entrepreneurs across 100+ industries and 60 countries. Its coaches—former CEOs, presidents, and executives—have led businesses ranging from startups to over $10 billion, driving double-digit sales and profit growth, many culminating in eight, nine, or ten-figure exits.
Companies that have worked with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have achieved an average revenue CAGR of 25.9%, nearly 3X the U.S. average, and an average EBITDA CAGR of 39.2%, more than 4X the national benchmark.
Discover how coaching can transform your leadership journey at ceocoachinginternational.com.
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