When Saville Assessment surveyed hundreds of HR decision-makers at large and enterprise organisations across the UK and US, one number stood out: 80% of senior HR leaders do not believe their organisation is fully prepared for the future world of work.
The next decade will demand leaders who can navigate AI-driven change, hybrid workforces, shifting employee expectations and relentless disruption, often simultaneously.
And the cost of having the wrong people in those roles is substantial. Replacing a poor senior hire runs somewhere between £100K-£300K. For C-suite roles, it can reach three times salary. Nearly two in ten leadership appointments made over the last three years were rated as regrettable by those surveyed.
The stats continue to stagger, and what makes this harder is that the problem isn’t always visible. More than half of HR leaders agree that strong internal talent is going unnoticed in their organisations, and less than half have access to reliable data to make promotion and succession decisions objective rather than subjective.
The good news? 87% of organisations plan to implement or scale data-driven assessment in the next 12 months. The window to act is open, and those who move with the right tools and science will pull ahead.
Saville Assessment’s latest report sets out what the leadership readiness gap looks like in practice, why the stakes are higher than most boards realise, and what organisations can do to build pipelines fit for what’s coming.
