When humans get in the way
Retained executive search firms charge $100k+ retainers with a 40% non-completion rate — and cold outreach to passive senior talent is making it worse. Here’s the real cost of a burned bridge in executive search.
The executive search industry’s failure rate isn’t a sourcing problem. It’s a timing problem that cold outreach makes permanently worse, destroying the very relationships the industry runs on.
The average cold email response rate for C-level executives is 4.2%. But the real damage isn’t the rejection rate. It’s the permanent loss of access that follows every miscalibrated first contact.