“The question isn’t, can we afford assessment? The question really is, can we afford to keep getting these decisions wrong?”
Olivia Black
Client Solutions Director
When we asked HR leaders what stops them securing leadership buy-in for assessment, one answer came out on top by a long way: demonstrating clear ROI. It beat budget objections, lack of senior sponsorship and competing HR priorities. The science holds up. The trouble is that a qualitative case rarely survives the trip to the finance committee intact, and it gets thinner every time it is handed on.
In this on-demand session, Chief Commercial Officer Hannah Mullaney and Client Solutions Director Olivia Black show how to reframe assessment spend as risk avoided rather than cost added. They cover the three pressures raising the bar for defensible people decisions: roles shifting fast with AI, budgets held one or two steps away from HR, and UK employment law changes from January 2027 that make a bad hire far more expensive.
The cost of waiting is real. The US Department of Labor puts the cost of a bad hire at around 30% of first-year salary, before you count team disruption, management time or customer impact. For senior and specialist roles, Olivia shares research putting that figure as high as 213% of salary. Every month a decision stalls, those costs compound.
Plus, Hannah walks through Saville’s business case tool live. It turns your organization’s own metrics into a CFO-ready ROI case in minutes, with every assumption sourced from research by SHRM, WTW, ONS, PwC and others.
What you’ll learn
- Why the qualitative case stalls at finance, and how to reframe assessment as risk avoided
- What a wrong hire or promotion really costs, and how that cost compounds over time
- How to move from HR advocacy to a CFO-style case built on savings, assumptions and risks
- How organizations including Jaguar Land Rover put numbers on quality of hire, screening time and interview hours
- A live walkthrough of our ROI business case tool, with worked examples for leadership hiring and high-potential identification
