Why searches for senior leadership roles fail

Fewer people want the job than could do it

Across leadership occupations in Germany, the shortfall of qualified people came to 28,180 as an annual average for 2025. The figure comes from the skilled labour database of the Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft (a German economic research institute) and counts positions for which no suitably qualified unemployed person was available.

The same research contains a second figure. Among employees without a leadership role, 14 percent can definitely see themselves taking one on. 40 percent would consider the step under certain conditions, 43 percent rule it out.

IW Köln, KOFA Kompakt 01/2026, survey conducted May to June 2025, 4,670 usable responses.

If you are filling a leadership position, you are recruiting in a field where the majority of the people qualified to do the work do not want it. What decides an acceptance is the shape of the role, the extent of the decision-making authority and the reporting line to the managing director, and all of that counts before the salary band does.

The advert reaches the wrong people

For its Engagement Index, Gallup surveys around 1,700 employees in Germany every year. For 2025, 12 percent were actively looking for a job. Another 25 percent keep an eye out for alternatives without actively searching. 64 percent do neither.

A job advert speaks to the first 12 percent. The executive whose results make them worth approaching belongs to the other 88 percent. They read no adverts, because they have no reason to.

Attachment to the employer sits well below the 2018 level. Back then, 78 percent of respondents expected to still be with their employer a year later. In 2024 it was 50 percent, in 2025 it came back up to 56 percent.

At leadership level, willingness to move runs higher. The Manager Barometer from Odgers Berndtson surveyed 1,242 executives in the German-speaking countries in 2025 and found 39 percent thinking about a move within twelve months, the highest reading since 2015. The study comes from an executive search firm, so read it with that interest in mind.

The process runs slower than the candidate decides

The Bundesagentur für Arbeit (the German Federal Employment Agency) reports an average time to fill of 154 days for the rolling twelve months to July 2026, counted from the start date the employer asked for. By its own reading, that is around 60 days longer than ten years ago.

Bundesagentur für Arbeit, monthly report July 2026. Only registered positions are counted. Leadership positions are rarely registered, so the figure works as a market indicator rather than a benchmark for the sector.

For search projects run by executive search firms, the BDU (the German association of management consultancies) puts the average project duration at 97 days for 2023, after 86 days the year before.

The bottleneck usually sits between the appointments: between a profile arriving and the response to it, between the first and the second interview, between the interview and the offer. An executive who has once opened up to the idea of moving is normally in several conversations at the same time. Four weeks to a response is enough to lose that person to a company that answers in two days.

Three things settled before the search starts change this: who takes part in the decision, which time slots those people hold open for interviews, and by when a candidate gets an answer. That costs an hour in the briefing and saves weeks along the way.

Selection tests the career history and misses the attitude

Over three years, Leadership IQ surveyed 5,247 hiring managers from 312 organisations about more than 20,000 new hires. 46 percent of those hired left within 18 months or were rated poorly. In 89 percent of these cases the reason lay in attitude and behaviour, in 11 percent in a lack of technical ability. The provider sells selection training, and the result supports what it sells. The sample and the method are disclosed. The figure covers all levels of hiring rather than leadership positions alone.

What such a mistake costs in money was pulled together by the Center for American Progress in 2012 from 30 case studies. The median cost of replacing someone came to 21 percent of annual salary. For leadership positions, individual cases ran up to 213 percent. The data is American and stops in 2007. Treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a basis for calculation.

Technical suitability can be read from the documents. Whether someone fits a particular company shows up in a conversation about real situations from the responsibility they have carried so far: which decision they last got wrong, how they led a team through a round of cuts, how they notice that a manager below them is not carrying the load. Questions like these take time, and they take someone on the other side of the table who can place the answers.

What you can change

Three of the four patterns lie within the company's reach. The shape of the role decides how much pull it has, and the pace of the procedure decides whether an executive stays in it. How deep the selection went shows only after twelve months.

The fourth pattern, access to executives outside the applicant market, is the part that direct approach exists for. It starts with the question of which companies carry comparable responsibility today.