How One Bad Interview Process Cost 10 Million Dollars

Episode 14 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna dissect a 2024 forensic analysis by the corporate-training firm Braintrust that tracked 68 failed executive hires across 40 companies. The average cost per failed VP-level hire: $1.4 million in direct costs — severance, recruiter fees, productivity losses. But the real shocker is that 70 percent of those failures could have been caught before the second interview. Lucas walks through the specific red flags that Braintrust found: structured scorecards ignored, reference calls skipped, cultural-fit questions avoided. Luna pushes back on whether any screening process can truly predict executive performance. They land on one practical takeaway: adding a single structured case-study exercise to the final round cuts failure rates by nearly half. This episode is for anyone who has ever watched a star candidate implode after onboarding. #HiringFails #ExecutiveHiring #RecruitmentProcess #BraintrustStudy #StructuredInterviews #ReferenceChecks #CaseStudyInterviews #CultureFit #HiringCosts #FailedHires #TalentAcquisition #LeadershipHiring #InterviewProcess #Business #FexingoBusiness #HiringAndFiring #BusinessPodcast #WorkforceDecisions Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo