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That's just ordinary hiring. No redundancy, no forced exit, and no financial pressure riding on the decision. Add those pressures, and the numbers get worse, not better.
Here's what it looks like in practice. The CFO asks how many senior people you've placed since the redundancy programme. You pull up the dashboard: 42 placements in six weeks. It looks like a win, and your team worked hard to make it happen.
Six months later, one of those 42 is job hunting again. The company they joined is quietly replacing them because the fit never really held. Nobody connects that outcome back to the placement that looked like success at the time.
That's the problem. You paid for a headline number rather than a lasting outcome. And the market usually finds out anyway through the very people you were trying to protect your reputation with.
Are we measuring success, or just speed? π―
Ask most organisations how they measure outplacement success, and you'll probably hear the same answer: time to placement. How quickly did our people land their next role?
It sounds rigorous. It's measurable. It's easy to report. But the evidence suggests it may be measuring the wrong thing entirely.
What the brain does with uncertainty π§
Prolonged uncertainty is one of the most uncomfortable states the human nervous system can hold. The brain doesn't simply dislike uncertainty. It interprets it as a threat and looks for the fastest way to make it stop, even if that means accepting the first reasonable offer.
The executive who wants to end the uncertainty quickly isn't necessarily making the best career decision. More often, they're making a regulatory one, reaching for relief. Under sustained stress, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for weighing long-term trade-offs, becomes less effective, and people naturally default to choices that feel familiar and lower risk.
The offer relieves the discomfort. The family exhales. The provider records a successful placement. But relief and long-term fit are not always the same thing.
Research supports this. A 2022 study by Gerards and Welters, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, followed almost 3,000 unemployed job seekers and found that financial hardship narrowed people's job search and lowered the threshold for what felt "good enough". Those decisions were reflected in job quality a year later.
A fast placement isn't always a success. Sometimes it's simply the most understandable response to uncertainty.
The cost that surfaces at month nine β³
Decisions made in a threat state tend to predict poor fit. Eight to twelve months in, that quickly placed executive is often looking again.
The individual pays in a stalled trajectory. The hiring organisation pays for a failed senior hire. Your outplacement provider has already recorded the placement and moved on - nobody is tracking whether the fit lasted.
The cost is real. It's just invisible unless you're deliberately measuring it.
What decision quality looks like as a metric π
The alternative isn't to abandon measurement. It's to measure what matters.
- Fit durability: Is the person still in the role and thriving at twelve months?
- Decision state: Was the choice made out of clarity or relief?
- Trajectory: Did they move to something that fits who they are now, or recreate what they just left?
Three questions for your next provider reviewπ
- What percentage of our placed leavers are still in that role at twelve months, and how would we know?
- Does our provider's commercial model reward speed or fit?
- If a leaver accepts the first offer within three weeks, do we automatically record it as a success - or was that decision made from clarity, or from relief?
If the answers make you slightly uncomfortable, that discomfort is data.
We work with HR and People leaders on how their most senior people leave and on measuring what the exit actually produced. If this is a live question in your organisation, message me directly.
Over the coming weeks, I'll be going deeper into the redundancy process. Follow me here to catch them.
References π
- Rock, D. (2008). SCARF: A Brain-Based Model for Collaborating With and Influencing Others. NeuroLeadership Journal, 1, 44-52.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Penguin Books.
- Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). "Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function." Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410-422.
- Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Tice, D. M. (2007). "The Strength Model of Self-Control." Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(6), 351-355.
- Rock, D., & Cox, C. (2012). "SCARF® in 2012: Updating the Social Neuroscience of Collaborating With Others." NeuroLeadership Journal, 4.
- Murphy, M. (2011). Hiring for Attitude. Leadership IQ.
- Gerards, R., & Welters, R. (2022). "Job search in the presence of a stressor: Does financial hardship change the effectiveness of job search?" Journal of Economic Psychology, 90, 102508.
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