RECRUITMENT
By InsidEntity Editorial Desk · Aug 3, 2026 · 5 min read
Every organisation on earth hires. Almost none of them hire with evidence, and the data shows exactly what that costs.
Recruitment, as an industry, still runs on a simple transaction: match a CV to a job spec, fill the seat, move on. But the businesses doing the hiring have changed. Whether you’re a listed company in Johannesburg, a scale-up in Singapore, or a family business in Frankfurt, you’re not trying to fill seats anymore. You’re trying to build teams that can withstand scrutiny, adapt to disruption, and hold up under governance pressure from regulators, investors, and boards.
A keyword match cannot deliver that. It was never designed to.
Today we are launching InsidEntity Talent Solutions, globally.
The failure is measurable, and massive
This isn’t an opinion. It’s one of the most replicated findings in management research:
- Heidrick & Struggles CEO Kevin Kelly reported, based on the firm’s internal data on 20,000 placements, that 40% of senior-level hires are pushed out, fail, or quit within 18 months. Leadership IQ‘s study of over 20,000 new hires put the figure at 46%.
- SHRM and Gallup put full replacement costs at 50–200% of annual salary, with failed executive hires running to $240,000 or more (CareerBuilder).
- Gallup estimates voluntary turnover alone costs US businesses $1 trillion a year.
And here’s the finding that should end the debate about how hiring gets done: in the Leadership IQ research, 89% of hiring failures were attitudinal, coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation, temperament. Only 11% were technical. Even more damning: 82% of hiring managers admitted they saw the warning signs during the interview.
Read that again. The information that predicts failure exists. The process just isn’t built to capture it.
The questions that actually matter
CV matching answers one question: does this person’s history look like the job description?
It does not answer the questions that determine whether a hire strengthens or weakens an organisation:
- Has this director’s track record held up across every board they’ve sat on?
- Does this candidate’s independence profile create exposure, or reduce it?
- Is the market for this skill set thinner or deeper than everyone assumes?
Traditional recruitment can’t answer these questions, because traditional recruiters don’t hold the data required to answer them. Anywhere in the world.
We already hold the data, and the data works
InsidEntity was not built as a recruitment business. It was built as a corporate governance intelligence platform, rating companies, directors, and countries across 249 countries and 145 stock exchanges. Our Company Risk Rating, Health Status Rating, and Economic Sustainability Rating exist because businesses and investors need to know who they’re dealing with, not what a CV or a pitch says about them.
And the evidence that governance intelligence predicts real outcomes is some of the strongest in finance:
- MSCI’s nine-year study (2015–2023) found that US companies leading on governance outperformed governance laggards by 2.7% annually, 26.3% cumulatively, with higher profitability, lower volatility, and lower earnings variability.
- The landmark Gompers, Ishii & Metrick study (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2003) found that a strategy of buying the strongest-governed firms and selling the weakest-governed firms earned abnormal returns of 8.5% per year.
If governance quality moves markets, it should move hiring decisions. We already track director independence, director capacity, auditor independence, and shareholder influence at global scale. We already know which governance patterns precede a company’s decline, and which precede its resilience.
Placing someone into a business is a governance decision as much as a resourcing one. It deserves the same rigour we apply everywhere else on the platform.
That is the thesis behind this launch: talent intelligence should be built on the same standard of evidence as risk intelligence, not on a keyword match.
What we’re launching
InsidEntity Talent Solutions covers the full spectrum, from student and graduate placement, through junior and mid-level roles, to executive search:
- Graduate and junior placement: placing students and early-career candidates into first roles and structured graduate programmes, vetted the same way as every other hire on the platform
- Specialist recruitment: filling technical and niche roles to the same evidentiary standard as the rest of the platform
- Executive search: sourcing and vetting leadership candidates against verified track records, not just CVs
- Talent intelligence: applying governance data to talent decisions, surfacing risk and capacity signals traditional recruiters cannot see
- Recruitment advisory: structuring hiring decisions around long-term governance outcomes
- Employer branding: positioning organisations to attract talent that fits their governance profile
- Market mapping: identifying where skills and leadership capacity actually sit, across sectors and geographies
Built on data. Grounded in partnership.
This is not a pivot away from governance intelligence. It’s an extension of it, to every organisation, in every market, that believes hiring is too important to run on intuition.
The same commitment to verified, sourced, defensible data that underpins our ratings now underpins how we source, vet, and place talent. Every recommendation is backed by evidence. Every partnership starts from a shared interest in outcomes that hold up over time, not a single transaction.
An industry with a 40–46% failure rate isn’t unlucky. It’s unmeasured.
Recruitment doesn’t have to stay broken. It just has to be rebuilt on better evidence.
Anywhere. For everyone.
The future starts on the inside.
Better entity intelligence, more risk mitigation | #KnowYourEntity
Sources: Heidrick & Struggles CEO Kevin Kelly, Financial Times interview, March 2009; Leadership IQ, “Why New Hires Fail” (20,000+ hires, 312 organisations); SHRM Human Capital Benchmarking; CareerBuilder State of Recruiting survey; Gallup; MSCI, “Corporate Governance: Market Matters” (2024); Gompers, Ishii & Metrick, “Corporate Governance and Equity Prices,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2003).