After what has felt like a rock-and-roll kind of year, I hope you managed to get away for a bit this summer.
I enjoyed exploring Belgium, Luxembourg (for the first time), and Germany, before travelling around the UK to visit family. Having spent the past 13 years in recruitment, I know how busy September is, so I wanted to ensure the batteries are fully charged.
If you are reading this in the first week or two of being back, there is a good chance you are already feeling the pull of a busy autumn ahead. I wanted to use this month's newsletter to share some data that caught my attention recently, and what I think it means for anyone with a hire coming up.
What your peers are telling us
ManpowerGroup published their 2026 Global Talent Shortage Survey earlier this year. It is one of the largest studies of its kind, covering more than 39,000 employers across 41 countries. The headline finding is that 72% of employers globally are reporting difficulty filling roles. In the UK, that figure is 73%. In France it is 74%. In Germany it reaches 83%. Wherever your business sits, the challenge is broadly the same. Finding the right person for the role in front of you has not become any easier.
What I find more interesting than the number itself is what it does not tell you. It tells you that those hiring are struggling to fill roles, but it does not tell you why. Most people assume the answer is a lack of candidates, and in some sectors and some regions that is part of it. But the research suggests the real issue is somewhere else entirely.
Where most hiring processes fall short
Leadership IQ studied more than 20,000 new hires across 312 organisations. They wanted to understand why new hires fail. The results are striking. 46% of new hires fail within their first 18 months. Only 19% go on to achieve what the researchers described as unequivocal success.
Those numbers alone should give anyone involved in hiring something to think about. But the part that has stayed with me is what sits underneath them. When they looked at why those hires failed, 89% of the time it came down to attitude, motivation, and fit. Only 11% failed because they could not do the job.
Think about that for a second. The thing that almost every hiring process is built to assess, whether someone has the skills and experience to do the work, accounts for just over one in ten failures. The thing that determines whether someone actually succeeds, who they are, how they show up, how they respond to pressure, how they work with the people around them, is the part that most processes barely touch.
I see this regularly in the conversations I have with those hiring. The brief is almost always written around the CV. Five years of experience in this. A qualification in that. A track record of delivering something specific. All of which matters. I am not suggesting you ignore it. But if nine out of ten hires that do not work out are failing for reasons that have nothing to do with their skills, then something important is being missed in how we decide who is right for the role.
What the 89% looks like
A good example of this is something we worked on recently. A client of ours needed to hire a sales manager. They had tried to fill the role themselves and the person they brought in did not last long. On paper, they were a strong hire. A good track record in sales, comfortable leading a team, confident in front of clients. The kind of profile that looks right in an interview.
The problem was not the person's ability. It was what the role was asking them to do. Sales has changed significantly over the past few years. Gartner's research suggests that B2B buyers now complete around 70% of their decision-making process before they engage with a sales team at all. The role of a sales manager in that environment is fundamentally different from what it was five or ten years ago. It is less about driving activity and managing a pipeline of cold outreach and more about building a team that can advise, listen, and guide buyers through complex decisions. The person leading that team needs to be wired for patience, relationship building, and long-term thinking.
The person our client had hired was wired for pace and urgency. They were naturally driven to push for results quickly, to set targets and chase them. In a transactional sales environment, that profile would have been a strong fit. In a consultative one, it created friction with the team and with the clients they were trying to build relationships with. The skills were all there. The behaviours were wrong for the environment.
This is what the 89% looks like in practice. It is not that the person was bad at their job. It is that the job needed something from them behaviourally that they were not naturally wired to give, and no amount of coaching or onboarding was going to comfortably close that gap.
Questions worth asking before your next hire
If the Leadership IQ research tells us anything, it is that the way most of us evaluate candidates is weighted too heavily toward the 11%. The skills, the experience, the track record. We spend most of our time on the part that is least likely to determine whether someone succeeds.
There are a few questions I would encourage you to think about before your next hire, regardless of the role. What does this position demand from someone behaviourally, not just technically? Is it a role that needs someone who thrives on structure, or someone who is comfortable without it? Does it need someone who communicates by thinking out loud, or someone who processes privately before they speak? Does the pace of the role suit someone who is energised by urgency, or someone who does their best work when they have time and space to be thorough?
These are not abstract questions. They are the difference between someone who feels like a natural fit from day one and someone who is stretching themselves into a shape that was never going to be sustainable. Most hiring managers have a sense of this, but it rarely makes it into the brief or the interview process in any structured way. It tends to live as a gut feeling, and gut feelings are hard to defend when the CV looks strong and the interview went well.
When we took the brief on the sales manager role, we used The Predictive Index to build a Job Target with the hiring manager and two senior stakeholders. It gave us a behavioural profile of what the role genuinely required, built from the people closest to it. Every candidate on our shortlist was assessed against that target. The person they hired would not have been the obvious choice from the CV alone, but their natural drives were closely aligned to what the role was asking for. They are still in the role.
Making the 89% visible
The challenge with behavioural fit is that it is invisible in a traditional hiring process. You cannot see it on a CV. You might catch glimpses of it in an interview, but interviews reward confidence and preparation, which are not the same as compatibility. By the time you know whether someone is genuinely suited to the role, they have usually been in it for three or four months, and by then the cost of getting it wrong has already started to build.
This is why we use behavioural data in every search we run. It does not replace the CV or the interview. It gives everyone involved in the decision a way to see the things that would otherwise only become visible months down the line. It is not a guarantee, but it moves the conversation from gut feel to something you can look at together, discuss openly, and use to make a more informed decision.
If you have a hire coming up this autumn, or if the numbers in this newsletter have made you think about how your current process handles the 89%, I would welcome the conversation. Reply to this email or give me a call.
Best of luck with your next hire this autumn.
Dave Crumby
Founder at 360 Talent Solutions | Certified PI Practitioner