What’s the magic number of candidates then? I worked with our firm’s research center in India on a massive analysis to study the relationship between how many people we had presented to our clients in thousands of executive searches all over the world and the “stick rate” of the one hired—that is, how many years he or she had stayed at the company, either in the original position or moving up to a more senior role. My expectation was that a larger pool of people interviewed would increase the stick rate, and that happened up to a point. But after three or four candidates, it rapidly declined, confirming that too many options generate sub optimal decisions.