I have watched companies run immaculate searches and then throw away the result in the first quarter.

The pattern is always the same. A board takes a senior hire seriously. They define the brief properly, they interview thoroughly, they check references, they negotiate carefully. Six months of genuine effort. Then the contract is signed, everyone congratulates each other, and the whole apparatus of care switches off overnight. The new director turns up on day one to a laptop, a login, and a diary that has already been filled by other people's priorities.

When a senior placement fails inside the first year, the post-mortem almost always blames the hire. Wrong fit, wrong culture, not what we thought. In my experience that diagnosis is wrong more often than it is right. The capability was usually there. What was missing was any deliberate attempt to convert an outsider into an insider. Nobody told them where the real decisions get made. Nobody explained which battles the last person in the role lost and why. Nobody stood next to them in the first leadership meeting and made it clear they had the chairman's backing. They were left to work out the politics alone, and in most businesses the politics is precisely the thing an outsider cannot see.

The signature is not the finish line. It is the point where the risk transfers. Before the offer, the risk sits with the process. After it, the risk sits with the landing. And the landing is the bit that almost no company resources, because there is no fee attached to it, no supplier chasing it, and no meeting in the diary called "make this work".

The cost of getting it wrong at director level is brutal. You lose the salary, the search fee, the opportunity cost of a role effectively vacant for eighteen months, and, worst of all, the story that spreads through the market about what happened to the last person. Good candidates hear those stories. I hear them weekly.

So here is what I would ask of any board making a senior appointment. Treat the first ninety days as part of the search, not what happens after it. Give the hire a named sponsor at the top table whose job is to open doors, not review performance. Book the check-ins before day one, at week two, week six and week twelve, and in those conversations ask one question above all: what have you found that surprised you? The answer tells you what your business actually looks like from the outside, and it tells you whether your new leader is landing or drowning.

If you are the candidate, negotiate your landing as hard as you negotiate your package. Ask who your sponsor will be. Ask what the last person in the role struggled with. A company that cannot answer those questions is telling you how the first year will go.

Hiring well is half the job. If you have a senior hire starting in the next quarter, open their diary today and look at their first fortnight. If all you see is inductions and introductions, fix it now.