Did you know that the true cost of a delayed executive hire in European fintech regularly exceeds €100,000?
Being the founder of a fintech recruitment agency, and having spent over a decade in fintech before that, I see the same pattern again and again: businesses think the cost of one hire equals the agency fee, or an internal recruiter's salary. That approach misses almost everything else, and it creates a huge gap between the real cost and the number most companies imagine.
What the €100,000 Is Actually Made Of
So what's really behind that number? Based on our internal data across executive searches, the full business cost splits into two halves. One half is visible from the start. The other half only shows up once the search is already underway.
The visible costs are the ones every budget already accounts for:
● Recruiter and sourcing costs (agencies, tools, employer branding)
● Costs for resource allocation for interview preparation, execution, and evaluation, including test tasks
● Costs for recruiters' time allocation for offer preparation, benchmarking, and negotiations
The hidden costs rarely show up in the budget, and they usually cost more:
● Time from every stakeholder involved: managers, the wider team, leadership ● Internal alignment and decision-making discussions
● Lost revenue, delayed projects, missed opportunities
● Team impact, including overtime, and reduced productivity
● Leadership distraction from strategic priorities
Once both halves are on the table, the scary number of €100,000 stops looking like an outlier. It starts looking conservative.
What Costs More, a Hiring Mistake or Lost Profit?
Most companies frame a leadership hire around one question: how much will this person cost? A far more useful question is what ROI, or return on investment, this hire will generate, and how fast.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A client came back to us almost exactly a year after we had first worked together on a C-level operations role. During our work together, they had found someone internally on their own, running a parallel search, and decided to hire the person directly, skipping the agency's fee.
The candidate joined and spent 3 months onboarding, and everyone hoped the fit would improve over the following 3 months, but it never did. The hire was let go after roughly 6 months, and the client came back to start the search from zero, a year later than the role should have been filled, with months of expenses behind them and nothing to show for it.
In a case like this, the cost of a bad hire goes well past €100,000. The team that absorbed the extra work, carried the leadership gap, and had to onboard someone new twice within a year felt every part of it, and none of that shows up on an invoice.
Define the Problem Before You Define the Person
The advice I always give businesses is to start with the business problem, not the person. The best hiring briefs do not describe a candidate. They define a problem, a timeline, and the trade-offs you are willing to make. Get this wrong, and you land back in the same trap that pushes the €100,000 even higher: a search that runs too long, because nobody agreed early on what "done" actually looks like.
A few traps to avoid:
1. Title ≠ Outcome. A job title says almost nothing about what the business actually needs solved. Search around a title, and you can interview for months without ever testing for the thing that matters.
2. The longer a search runs, the more the bar quietly drops. After months of interviews, "we had a good conversation" starts to feel like enough, even when it isn't the outcome the role was meant to deliver.
3. Chasing "perfect" adds weeks, and it rarely pays off. Every extra nice-to-have narrows the pool of real candidates and stretches the timeline. You can wait for someone who does it all, or hire someone who owns the most urgent piece now and grows into the rest. The second option is usually in the seat first, moving the business forward, while the first is still interviewing.
Think of hiring like picking the perfect orange at the market. The goal is the juiciest fruit, never the prettiest label. Hiring works the same way: you are looking for the person who can move the business forward, and a perfect CV is not always the same thing.
How Not to Lose €100k on a Bad Hire
Before opening a position, every manager should know 3 numbers: the monthly cost of keeping the role open, the cost of a bad hire, and the ROI the employee is expected to generate.
Most businesses skip this step. It feels like extra work when the decision could just be made on instinct. In fintech, running the numbers first is what turns a hiring decision into a business decision.
If you're planning an executive hire anytime soon, here are a few principles that help avoid mistakes and hire the right person.
Choose the right hiring tool for the job. An in-house recruiter makes sense for steady, high-volume hiring. An agency earns its fee on rare, niche, or C-level searches, where the expertise simply isn't in-house yet.
Hire for where the business is going. As a business, you already know which major shifts are coming: expansion into a new market or a change in regulatory requirements. That's why you should hire your next executive for a strategic goal, but not for a short-term problem.
Every role should have an expected ROI. Before the offer goes out, know how this person is meant to pay for themselves.
Buy value, not a cheap salary. A strong candidate looks expensive right up until you calculate what having them actually saves you.
Remember: an executive seat is never really empty. It has a running cost, in profit, in team energy, and in time nobody gets back. The businesses that put a number on that cost early are the ones that make faster, better decisions when it matters most.