Fragile
Structural gaps producing poor outcomes now.
The Talent Audit
You're about to find out how you actually hire.
A fixed-scope diagnostic that shows you the distance between the hiring you think you have and the one that is really running.
Get the full sample report →
The instrument
The whole system, seen at once.
Over three to four weeks, Calder Talent looks at your hiring from every seat that touches it: the people who lead it, the people who run it, the managers who hire with it, and the people it recently hired. Nobody inside a business holds all of those views at once. That is exactly why the gaps survive.
The audit does not grade you against a textbook. It measures your process against itself: what leadership believes happens, versus what actually happens. Where those match, you are solid. Where they split, you are paying for it.
What you walk away with
A picture you can act on.
- 01 · The scorecard. Where your hiring holds, where it leaks, and what each leak is costing you. Written in plain language, built to be shared with your board or your team as-is.
- 02 · Your first moves. Every weak spot comes with a concrete first move you can make yourself.
- 03 · The debrief. A working session, not a presentation. We walk the findings, agree what matters, and leave you with a decision you can defend.
- 04 · The ninety-day re-check. We come back, re-measure the pieces you worked on, and show you what moved. Part of every audit.
The audit
Eight links. Both views.
Eight links. Both views.
Every gap measured.
The eight dimensions are the links in your hiring chain, from the brief that opens a role to what happens after the start date. Each one is scored twice: how leadership believes it runs, and how it actually runs. Where the two match, the link holds. Where they split, that is a leak, and the audit ranks it by what it is costing you. These are the eight, in plain terms. There is no secret method behind them to protect. The value is the hard work, done properly: both views gathered, every gap measured, and what is actually true written down.
Same questions, both sides, scored the same way.
01The briefThe link that opens the chain. Vague here, and everything downstream inherits the fog.
02The processWhether hiring runs the same way twice, or reinvents itself every role.
03The interviewersThe people making the calls, and whether they're equipped to make them.
04OwnershipWho actually owns each hire, and what happens when nobody does.
05The toolsWhat your stack does for you, and what it quietly does to you.
06The candidate's sideWhat good people experience from first contact to offer, and why they walk.
07The evidenceWhat gets measured, what gets guessed.
08After the start dateWhether week one keeps the promises the process made.
What lands on your desk
Most businesses have never seen themselves like this.
Nobody has taken your hiring apart, link by link, and written down what is actually true. The audit does exactly that, across fourteen sections. These five give you the idea. Real pages, made-up client.
Section 04
One word for where you stand.
The whole system, weighted by what each dimension does to your commercial outcomes, lands on one honest band. The definition sits underneath it, so the word actually means something.
04 · Overall Health
Where your hiring system sits today
Exposed
Exposed
Foundations exist but leak under load.
Functional
Works today. Will strain as you grow.
Strong
A hiring system you can build on.
Section 05
Every gap measured, not felt.
Leadership's read minus the view from the people closest to the work, dimension by dimension on the five-point scale. Anything past one full point means decisions at the top are being priced off a different picture than the one on the ground.
05 · The Gap, Measured
Process Consistency
1.4
Role Clarity
1.2
Candidate Experience
1.2
Onboarding Integration
1.2
Accountability
1.1
Manager Capability
0.8
Data & Measurement
0.7
Tools & Technology
0.3
Gap = leadership's read minus the consolidated read. Clay bars sit a full band or more apart. Five of eight cross that line.
Section 07
Your own people, verbatim.
The same question, answered from different seats and quoted word for word. The space between the answers is what the audit measures, and it lands differently when it is your people saying it.
07 · In Their Words
The same question, two seats
“We have a process everyone follows. It’s one of the things we’ve got right.”Leadership · on process consistency
“If you asked three of our managers to describe how we hire, you’d get three answers, and two of them would be wrong.”TA / HR Lead · same question
Section 09
Worked all the way down to a first move.
The findings that carry the report get the full treatment: what the data says, what it is costing you, and a first move with an owner and a definition of done. Yours to run whether or not you ever spend another dollar with us.
09 · Deep Dives
02Candidate ExperienceSolid
What the Data Says
This is the finding the average tried to bury. All three internal respondents rated candidate experience at the very top of the scale. The one person who was recently a candidate placed it near the bottom.
What This Is Costing You
Strong candidates are being lost at the offer-decision stage and recorded as bad luck. Every declined offer at a 40-day time-to-fill resets the clock on a role you needed filled six weeks ago.
Your First Move
Before the next search closes, send a three-question feedback note to every candidate who reached final interview in the last six months, hired or not. Read the replies aloud at the next leadership meeting.
Section 12
The gap, priced in your own numbers.
Built from your volumes and rates, with every assumption printed beside the line it feeds and kept at the conservative end. What cannot be estimated honestly is named and left out, so the total reads as a floor.
12 · What This Costs You
Declined offers
About 15 chosen candidates a year say no, and each search restarts at the final step.
$120k to $225k
Early attrition
About 11 people a year are gone before they have finished landing.
$375k to $700k
The gap, priced conservatively
Before anything we chose not to model.
$0.5m to $0.9m a year
Yours is written about your business.
We reply personally. An intro call is there if you want it.
Straight answers
- How disruptive is it? A few conversations and some structured input from the people who touch hiring. Nobody loses a day of work.
- Do we have to buy anything after? No. The audit is built to be valuable standalone. Fix what it finds with us or without us; the report is yours either way.
- What does it cost? Fixed fee, agreed before we start, held for the intro call. No surprises, no scope creep.
- Is the audit the only way in? No. We also run retained search and embedded delivery, on the same discipline the audit measures. If your problem is a role or a workload rather than the system, start there; the doors connect either way.
- Is this AI consulting? No. We are not AI transformation consultants. We make sure the process underneath any tool you adopt actually holds.
- What are our people told? That Calder Talent is reviewing how the business hires, from every seat. Individual responses are confidential; everything in the report is attributed to the seat, never the person.
- How do you approach candidates who said no? Only with your agreement on who and how, and framed around their experience of your process, never a re-opened application.
- What do you need from us? Fifteen to twenty minutes of structured input from each person who touches hiring, an hour of conversation with each, and a pointer to the data you already have.
- Who does the work? A senior practitioner, end to end. The person on the intro call is the person doing the work.