The Hardest Person to Recruit Isn’t the Candidate
As newer generations step up into bigger roles, firms are discovering that candidates’ spouses and children can be a hard sell.
The candidate beamed. The new role would give him unparalleled impact on his industry, as well as a fat paycheck and access to the company’s transportation fleet. After a recruiting trip, he was ready to sign on the dotted line. But when he returned home, he found a seventeen-year-old in tears, and a spouse who was still recovering from the stress of the previous move.
As boomers retire at a 4-million-per-year clip, they are slowly relinquishing top roles to candidates who are typically younger and who often have children or spouses at home: 80% of relocating candidates move with a spouse, and nearly half with children, according to figures from job prep firm Impact Group. Many of those families are rarely enthused about a sudden move. One-third of employees who declined a 2025 relocation cited family issues, according to data from the annual corporate-relocation survey by Atlas Van Lines. For leaders, this is not a trivial matter: an unhappy family member can turn a successful placement into a failed one. “One of the biggest indicators of a new executive’s success is the comfort of their loved ones,” says engagement expert Mark Royal, senior client partner at Korn Ferry.
Firms have long worked to help ensure the adaptation of managers' and leaders' whole families in expat roles. But now, with a steady stream of thirty-, forty- and fifty-something candidates slowly filling jobs long held by older executives, the dynamic of firms catering to families is becoming prevalent stateside—and family matters are becoming a key part of the hiring deal itself. “Family-related support is often a deciding factor in whether a candidate accepts a role,” says compensation expert Tom McMullen, senior client partner at Korn Ferry.
To be sure, recruiting the whole family is financially risky: a quickly planned, luxe trip for a whole family can cost many tens of thousands of dollars. As a rule of thumb, recruiting a candidate typically costs 25% to 35% of an executive’s total annual pay, and family recruitment can push those numbers toward the stratosphere. And it’s not necessarily money well spent: the candidate still might not take the job. And even if they do, the average US job tenure has now shrunk to 3.9 years in 2024, down from 4.6 years in 2014, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Experts say that this is simply the cost of recruiting. Relocation packages were once about moving. No longer. Now firms offer home- sale and home-purchase assistance, temporary housing, and house-hunting trips for the whole family, plus full-service moves and cost-of-living adjustments, and where applicable, tax support, says McMullen. Depending on the locale, sometimes these services are not enough, and so firms are moving toward more personalized and flexible relocation programs. Today’s best relocation packages are actually about thriving. “They’re designed to help entire families build new lives,” says McMullen.
At the C-suite level, companies are rolling out the red carpet: concierge services, family travel allowances, cultural integration coaching, and specialized financial-planning assistance. The underlying philosophy is simple. “The cost of helping a family transition successfully is often far less than the cost of a failed executive hire,” says McMullen.
Firms are finding this to be a worthwhile investment, from handshake to second anniversary. Recruiters brim with tales of family members tanking an otherwise perfect hiring arrangement. “I’ve had two CFO searches this year where everything was agreed until the very end, when the spouse vetoed the move,” says Marnix Boorsma, senior client partner in the Amsterdam office at Korn Ferry. “Both searches had to restart.” And experts acknowledge that a miserable spouse or family member leads to a distracted executive. Instead of fully focusing their attention on the new role, the executive is pulled toward helping their middle schooler make friends or supporting a depressed and lonely spouse, says Royal.
Experts say that recruiting should now include the family as much as possible. This can mean inviting everyone on a final recruiting trip, so that while a candidate is in preparatory meetings, perhaps his baseball-loving sons might be attending team practice nearby. Support to spouses involves not just job placement, but also career coaching, networking introductions, recruiter access and job-search support. For children, firms provide connections with local schools and support with enrollment, so that parents are not struggling to meet sudden application deadlines.
The support does not end once a family arrives. Settling-in services now include neighborhood orientation healthcare referrals, pet-relocation support and banking assistance—all of which can otherwise be a huge amount of work for family members. “All these gestures accumulate and send the signal that the firm is not focused only on the work that the executive is going to do,” says Royal.
That help can pay dividends. Months later, when the executive needs to skip a family outing in favor of work, Royal says the family is likely to react differently if someone from the company bought them dinner on the day they moved and helped them sign up for Little League.
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