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Hiring Engineers From Canada: The Weak-Loonie Window Four months ago, we placed a senior electrical engineer who had spent fifteen years building the exact skill set the US market is desperate for right now. His specialty was data center construction, the single hardest engineering capability to find in the country today, and he had it in depth. He was a director at a Canadian firm, earning 310,000 Canadian dollars a year, and he had hit a ceiling. The VP title he wanted was

What Should Be in a Retained Executive Search Contract? Most companies read a retained search contract for the fee and sign the rest. That is backwards, and it is understandable. The fee is the biggest number on the page, so it gets the attention. But the fee is the most standardized thing in the document. Nearly every retained firm lands in the same range and bills on roughly the same schedule, which we break down in what an executive search actually costs. If you spend your

Candidate Ghosting: Why Executives Leave Your Search Candidates do not usually tell you they are dropping out. They just stop answering. Companies experience this as a betrayal. A candidate who seemed engaged, who asked sharp questions, who said all the right things in the second interview, simply disappears. The hiring manager takes it personally. The team assumes the candidate was never serious. They were serious. Here is what most companies never find out: somewhere betwee

How Often Do Manufacturing Searches Fail? Nearly half of the executive searches run in this country do not work. That is not a rounding error and it is not one bad recruiter. According to industry research compiled by ESIX, the Executive Search Information Exchange, more than 40 percent of executive searches fail, and multiple independent studies put the range at 40 to 50 percent within the first 18 months. A single failed senior hire costs roughly $240,000 once hiring costs,

What Is the Real Counter-Offer Acceptance Rate? The most quoted statistic in recruiting is that 80 percent of people who accept a counter-offer leave within six months, and it is also the statistic you should trust the least. You have heard the number. Recruiters repeat it in every counter-offer conversation as if it were law. The trouble is that when you go looking for the study behind it, it is not there. The figure circulates without a credible primary source, and some of

Why New Executives Fail in Their First 90 Days Every company that has lost a senior hire remembers the resume. It was excellent. The references checked out. The interviews went well, and the room agreed this was the one. Then ninety days later something was clearly wrong, and within a year the person was gone. Most of the time, nobody can say exactly what happened. Here is what the data says happened. The Corporate Executive Board, now part of Gartner, found that somewhere be

VP of Finance Two people can hold the title VP of Finance in the same city, in companies the same size, and be paid sixty thousand dollars apart, because the title is describing two entirely different jobs. This is the confusion that wrecks finance searches in the mid-market. Companies use controller and VP of Finance almost interchangeably, then benchmark both against a single survey number, and end up either overpaying for a bookkeeper or underpaying for a strategic finance

What Does a CHRO Make in a Mid-Market Company? The hardest executive seat to price in a mid-market company is the one most companies have never actually filled at the senior level. Ask what a chief human resources officer costs and you get a number that is almost always too low, because the number being quoted is for a different job. The published benchmark measures human resources managers. A true CHRO, the executive who owns talent strategy, succession, compensation design,

How to Structure Executive Pay to Win a Candidate Most companies lose a senior candidate over base salary, and base salary was never the thing that would have won them. We watch it happen the same way every time. A company decides what a role is worth, fixes a base salary number, and treats every conversation after that as a fight over that one number. Meanwhile the candidate they actually want is sitting on unvested equity, a bonus they will forfeit by leaving, and a long ru

Can You Negotiate a Retained Executive Search Fee? Yes, you can negotiate a retained executive search fee, and any firm that tells you otherwise is being precious about it. The real question is what you should negotiate, because the buyers who push hardest on the headline percentage consistently get the worst outcomes, and the buyers who negotiate structure instead get real protection without touching the thing that determines search quality. We are going to answer this the w

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch recently wrote a sharp column on Pennsylvania's data center surge, connecting the biggest capital wave this state has seen in a generation to the AI buildout driving it. He cited our research on what the data center boom means for leadership hiring in Pennsylvania, and he asked the right question about who powers all of it. This post takes his question one step further, because there is a second question almost nobody in those boardrooms

When to Relocate an Executive vs. Hire Local Every company assumes hiring local is the cheap option. It is not always true, and treating it as gospel has cost more than one Western Pennsylvania company its best possible leader. A relocation package looks expensive on paper. According to a Worldwide ERC study, the average relocation cost for a homeowner employee runs about $97,000, and most executive relocation packages start around $80,000, climbing to $200,000 or more depend

How Does an Indian Company Hire Its First US Leaders An Indian company expanding into the United States faces a hiring problem no European competitor has: the most common investor visa paths are closed. India has no E-2 treaty with the United States. The workarounds that a British, German, or Korean company takes for granted simply do not exist for you, which means your US leadership strategy cannot be copied from theirs. It has to be built around a different set of constrain

Why Foreign Pharma Struggles With US Leadership Hires In 2025, five European pharmaceutical companies committed roughly 173 billion dollars to United States operations. AstraZeneca announced 50 billion. Roche announced 50 billion. GSK committed 30 billion. Novartis announced 23 billion. Sanofi committed 20 billion. Those are the companies' own public announcements, made within a single year, and they represent one of the largest waves of foreign direct investment into America

Should Job Postings Show Total Comp, Not Just Base? Most executive job postings show one number. It is almost never the number that matters. A senior operations role goes up with a base salary range and nothing else. Somewhere in a compensation file that never leaves HR sits the rest of the offer: a bonus structure worth another third of that base, a long-term incentive plan, sometimes a relocation package or a signing bonus for the right person. None of it makes it into the

Why America Is Still the Best Place to Manufacture Every pitch deck for bringing manufacturing to the United States leads with the same three slides. Federal tax credits. State incentive packages. Infrastructure grants. Somewhere around slide four, if it appears at all, is the actual reason companies who make this move say it worked: the people on the floor. We have sat in enough of these conversations, on both sides of the table, to say this plainly. Incentives get a company

Signs Your Best Operator Is About to Leave Over Pay The best operator in your company will never file a complaint about pay. They will simply stop mentioning it, and one day they will be gone. Every retained search firm has a version of this story, and every CEO who has lost a great operator has told a version of it back to us, usually a few months too late. The employee who quietly took on the scope of two or three roles after a reorg. The one who never asked for the title c

How Patriotism Improves Organizational Performance Every company runs a version of the same experiment a country runs. It asks a group of people to care about something bigger than their own paycheck, and it finds out fast whether that ask was real or decorative. Most mission statements fail this test. Patriotism, at its best, passes it constantly, and the mechanism behind why it works is not sentimental. It is the same mechanism every high-performing organization is quietly

How Do You Measure the ROI of an AI Agent Deployment Every company deploying AI agents in 2026 says they are tracking ROI. Press for the actual metric and the room goes quiet. You hear about queries handled, hours theoretically saved, and an accuracy score from a demo that never touched real data. None of those are returns. They are activity dressed up as outcome, and a board that accepts them is funding a project it cannot evaluate. In placing both human and agent resources

cost of a bad executive hire Most companies budget for the cost of hiring an executive. Almost none budget for the cost of hiring the wrong one. The fee, the search, the relocation, the signing bonus, those are the numbers that show up in a board packet. The number that actually matters never does. It hides inside eighteen months of stalled decisions, a team that quietly starts updating their resumes, and a strategic window that closes while the seat churns. In more than thir