BOARDS ARE BUYING SPEED AND CALLING IT RIGOR

Open any executive search firm's homepage right now and you'll find some version of the same pitch: AI-powered sourcing, shortlists in days instead of weeks, faster time-to-slate than the firm down the street. It's become the industry's entire marketing vocabulary. Speed is the product.

Nobody selling that pitch is asking the question a board actually needs answered: is speed the thing that was broken?

Look at what's happening in boardrooms right now and the answer looks like no. CEO turnover hit a record high in 2025, with 234 CEOs departing globally, a 16% increase over 2024 and 21% above the eight-year average. Among U.S. public companies specifically, 446 CEOs exited in 2025, the highest annual total on record since Challenger, Gray & Christmas started tracking the number in 2002, up from 373 the year before. Average outgoing CEO tenure fell to 7.1 years, down from 7.4 in 2024 and well below the 8.3-year average recorded in 2021. The runway a new leader gets to prove themselves keeps getting shorter, and boards keep cycling through people faster to try to fix it.

That's not a market that needed a faster hiring process. That's a market with a judgment problem, dressed up as a speed problem.

The interim boom is a symptom, not a strategy

The fractional and interim executive trend gets pitched constantly as a flexibility story: agile leadership, capacity on demand, right-sized cost. That framing is doing a lot of work to avoid the more uncomfortable read.

Interim CEO appointments made up 18% of all incoming CEOs in early 2025, compared to just 6% during the same period in 2024, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That's not a company discovering a smarter operating model. That's a board that got to the moment of truth on a permanent hire and didn't have enough conviction in any candidate, internal or external, to commit. An interim placement buys time. It doesn't buy judgment. It postpones the decision a board was supposed to have already made through succession planning that either didn't happen or didn't produce a real answer.

Layer in that 86% of global CEO hires in 2025 went to first-time CEOs at public companies, and the picture sharpens further. Boards are taking bigger swings on unproven leaders at the exact moment they're also parking more seats in interim status because they're not confident in anyone. Those two facts don't cancel each other out. They're the same problem showing up twice: a weakened pipeline, patched over in two different ways depending on how much risk a given board is willing to admit to.

Russell Reynolds put it plainly in its 2025 CEO Turnover Index: the grace period new leaders used to get to clarify their mandate and build alignment "has been severely compressed." Boards aren't just hiring faster. They're demanding proof faster, from leaders they vetted less thoroughly to begin with. That's the actual trade being made, and it's not one any search firm's homepage is advertising.

Speed doesn't pay for itself

The economics don't support optimizing for speed either. According to SHRM's 2025 Benchmarking Report, the average cost to hire an executive is $35,879, nearly seven times the $5,475 average for a non-executive hire. That premium exists because organizations are supposed to be paying for depth: more diligence, more reference checks, more time spent confirming fit before an offer goes out. When AI compresses the sourcing timeline but the diligence underneath it doesn't get deeper, a board is paying executive-level prices for a process that increasingly resembles a faster version of volume hiring.

And the cost of getting it wrong dwarfs the cost of hiring at all. Executive mis-hires typically run five to 27 times the person's annual salary once you account for severance, lost productivity, team disruption, and the cost of running the search again, according to Topgrading research published in Forbes. A mis-hired CEO sits at the far end of that range, in part because an incoming chief executive typically brings in their own leadership team, so one bad call at the top compounds into several. Roughly 80% of employee turnover traces back to a bad hiring decision somewhere upstream, per the same research. A faster shortlist that produces the wrong person isn't a win. It's an expensive way to arrive at the same problem sooner.

AI can accelerate the wrong hire just as easily as the right one

The assumption baked into most of the AI-in-search marketing is that faster sourcing and faster screening are neutral improvements, that speed just removes friction without changing what gets selected for. A separate Forbes piece from the same Topgrading research team makes the opposite case directly: humans still recognize top performers faster than AI does, and AI is just as capable of accelerating the wrong hire as the right one. Candidates using AI to polish resumes and rehearse interview answers make it easier to look qualified on paper and harder to verify substance underneath. Meanwhile, the perceived efficiency of an AI-assisted process creates its own pressure: hiring managers report feeling pushed to fill a role quickly even when they aren't fully satisfied with the finalists in front of them.

That's the mechanism worth sitting with. Speed doesn't just fail to fix a judgment problem. It can actively suppress the signals that would have caught one, because a five-day shortlist doesn't leave room for the kind of extended reference conversations, direct-report interviews, and slow pattern-recognition work that surfaces whether someone is actually right for the seat versus good at describing why they are.

In searches we're running right now, the briefs that come in increasingly lead with speed and volume metrics before the client has fully defined what "right" looks like for the seat. That's not a knock on any one client. It's a reflection of what the market has trained boards and hiring committees to ask for first.

Boards are talking about talent. That's not the same as owning it.

To be fair to boards, talent has moved up the agenda. According to PwC's 2025 Annual Corporate Directors Survey, 72% of directors say talent management is now a priority discussed at every board meeting. That's a real shift from a decade of talent being a once-a-year succession-planning checkbox.

But discussing talent isn't the same as owning the judgment behind a specific hiring decision. A board that talks about leadership risk in the abstract at every meeting can still default to speed and pattern-matching when an actual seat needs filling under pressure, especially when the search firm in the room is selling velocity as the differentiator and nobody in the room is equipped to push back on that framing. Oversight without a defined standard for what rigor actually looks like in a specific search is oversight in name only.

The question boards should be asking

Every search firm right now will tell a board how fast it can deliver a slate. None of them are going to volunteer the question that actually matters, because it's not a question their pitch is built to answer.

The record churn, the compressed tenures, the jump in interim placements, the first-timer bets: none of that reads like an industry that solved its problem by getting faster. It reads like an industry that got faster at making the same mistake.

So the question a board should be putting to itself, and to whichever firm is running its next search, isn't "how quickly can we fill this seat." It's: what, specifically, are we confident this person can do that the last person couldn't, and what evidence do we actually have for that, beyond how fast we got to a name?