How Lumnary Tech Solutions removed the downside risk from permanent hiring decisions.

There is a particular silence that follows an early resignation.

The role was open for weeks. The shortlist took effort. Three panels made time for interviews. An offer was negotiated, accepted, and a start date agreed. The person joined, settled in — and then, somewhere inside the first three months, handed in their notice.

Everything spent is gone. The role reopens at zero. The team that was already short-handed stays short-handed, now for another two months.

Early attrition is the quietest and most expensive failure in permanent recruitment, and most hiring teams absorb it alone.

What Early Exits Actually Cost

The visible cost is the recruitment spend. The real cost sits underneath it.

• The time already invested — screening hours, panel hours, approval cycles, and the leadership attention that went into signing off the hire
• The delivery gap, which does not pause while the role is re-advertised; work gets redistributed to a team already at capacity
• The restart, because a pipeline built two months ago has gone cold and candidates who were available then are not available now
• The confidence cost — after one early exit, hiring managers become cautious, and cautious hiring is slow hiring

Teams that have been through this once tend to over-correct. They add interview rounds, extend deliberation, and insist on more approvals, all of which lengthen the cycle and increase the chance of losing good candidates to faster competitors.

What We Changed

Lumnary Tech Solutions provides replacement support for candidates who leave within the first three months, subject to the terms agreed with each client.

When a replacement requirement arises, the process is deliberately fast:

• We revisit the existing pipeline immediately. Candidates assessed during the original search are re-engaged first, which is considerably quicker than starting a fresh search
• We identify suitable profiles against the same brief, with the advantage of now understanding the role, the team, and the environment far better than we did at the start
• We conduct the necessary screening to the same standard as the original process — a replacement is not a lowered bar
• We coordinate the full process with the client through to joining, exactly as before

The client does not restart. They resume.

Why This Changes the Relationship, Not Just the Contract

Replacement support is usually read as a warranty clause. In practice it does something more useful: it aligns our incentives with the client’s beyond the placement date.

Without it, a recruitment partner is paid when someone joins. Whether that person is still there in month four is somebody else’s problem. With replacement support, an early exit costs us the work twice — which means we have no reason to close a role quickly with a candidate unlikely to stay.

That changes behaviour earlier in the process. It makes honest expectation-setting at the screening stage worth more than a fast placement, because a mismatch surfaced before the offer costs nothing, and a mismatch surfaced in month two costs a full search.

What Clients Get From It

Hiring assurance. A difficult hiring decision carries less downside when the worst case is covered.

Reduced disruption. Early attrition becomes a setback measured in weeks rather than months.

Decisive hiring. Clients can commit to a strong candidate rather than defending against an unlikely one — and defensive hiring is how good candidates get lost.

Continuity of manpower, which is the actual objective. Filling a position is a transaction. Keeping the position filled is the outcome the client needed in the first place.

Key Takeaways for Hiring Teams

• Ask what happens if the hire leaves in month two. The answer tells you how your recruitment partner is incentivised
• Early attrition is usually a screening failure, not bad luck. It traces back to expectations set imprecisely at the start
• Guarantees change behaviour before they are invoked. The value is in how they shape the original search, not only in the replacement
• Defensive hiring has a cost too — usually paid in the strong candidates lost while the team deliberates

Hiring for Permanent Roles?

We support permanent recruitment end to end, with replacement support built into the engagement — so an early exit is a setback, not a restart.