Alioth Offers Two-Year Hiring Guarantee

July 21, 2021 – Executive search firm Alioth has launched a two-year guarantee for any new executive placed using the company’s retained executive search service anchored by its organizational diagnostic platform, Exploration, which is included at no additional cost. “The use of Alioth’s Exploration platform in executive search provides an experience for hiring organizations and their candidates like no other,” said Henry Nothhaft Jr., president and chief product officer. “It generates transformational insights about your organizational culture and the open position, enabling you to identify and successfully recruit the candidate with the highest probability to thrive.”

Exploration, an organizational culture diagnostic platform to align talent and culture, was launched this spring. The platform generates and applies AI to a unique dataset of quantitative and qualitative information to deliver actionable insights for leaders focused on building a robust organizational culture across a wide array of industries.

The new hire guarantee provides an added layer of assurance for customers, who are no longer willing to assume the risk of failure as an outcome of the executive search process, said the Austin, TX-based firm. According to the Corporate Executive Board, 50 percent to 70 percent of executives fail within 18 months of being hired. The foremost cause of this high rate of failure is cultural misalignment. Founded with a mandate to solve this unacceptable and costly problem, Alioth’s novel approach, said the firm, combines deep executive search expertise with AI to match uniquely relevant executive talent to a company’s specific needs and distinct cultural texture.

Finding Talent

The guarantee is built upon the growing track record of success Alioth has established placing executives with the help of Exploration. Alioth said that customers from a wide array of industries — including life sciences, technology, and professional services — have already used the insights from Exploration to hire exceptional executive talent.

Bad executive hires are tremendously expensive for both the company and the misplaced executive. For innovative companies focused on rapid growth, a failed executive hire can result in significant disruption and a crucial loss of time. According to a Leeds School of Business research report, the cost of a departing senior executive ranges as high as 40 times their base salary. This doesn’t account for the harmful secondary impacts of a failed hire, including the negative cultural and organizational implications such as lost productivity, decreased morale and unwanted turnover. As important, but often forgotten, is the cost to the misplaced hire.

“In many ways, the current model of executive search is flawed because it fails to properly account for the vital nature of culture fit, which results in an average executive hire turnover rate of 18 months,” said Janet Stafford, Alioth CEO and co-founder. “When we founded Alioth, we set out to reinvent this inadequate model, focusing on delivering cutting-edge technology to enable new solutions to the nuanced challenges of finding impactful executive talent that sticks. We have delivered on those efforts, and with today’s announcement, we are backing our belief in the value of this work and the capabilities of our platform.”

Aligned Leaders

“We are at a massive inflection point in the workplace that requires intentional and thoughtful hiring at the executive level to ensure employees are working for leaders who align with their companies, and their own values,” said Alioth co-founder Rusty Rueff. “These decisions cannot be made in a vacuum. We must do better at hiring — we owe that to the job candidates and existing employees, not to mention saving time and money by getting the decision right the first time.”

Exploration builds upon Alioth’s executive search capabilities, enabling companies to also unlock deep organizational and cultural insights. Exploration not only helps scale talent acquisition for robust growth and sustained competitive advantages, said the firm, but also provides a standalone comprehensive solution for insights, highlighting both organizational strengths and nascent issues to reveal untapped potential and crucial blind spots.

“Our key insight for developing Exploration comes from the recognition that when new hires don’t work out, it almost always maps back to culture fit and misaligned expectations,” said Ms. Stafford when Exploration was launched. “Companies do not have reliable methods for understanding the distinct, and often hidden, cultural texture of their organizations and how it informs the attributes that will be most determinant of a new hire’s success. Exploration allows us to radically redefine the scope of services and value proposition of traditional executive search.”

Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media