The 30-60-90 Day Plan Has Lost Its Signal. Here’s What to Test Instead

The 30-60-90 day plan has been one of the most common and reliable diagnostic tools in the executive hiring process over the past decade. Candidates are asked to assess the business and outline the priorities they would pursue in their first months on the job, giving hiring teams insight into how they think about the role, communicate, respond to challenges, and land on decisions. 

In our work advising boards, investors, and leadership teams on executive hiring, we regularly see the plan used to assess finalists. AI tools have changed what this process might reveal, and hiring committees need to reconsider how the exercise fits into the broader evaluation of the candidate. 

For a board or investor hiring an executive to deliver on a growth strategy or value creation plan, a credible presentation is only a starting point. The assessment needs to establish whether the candidate can deliver those priorities with the team, resources, and time available. 

False Positives Created by AI 

Two signals have become particularly difficult to interpret: candidate motivation and ownership of the thinking behind the plan. 

False Positive #1: Effort and Motivation 

A polished plan, often delivered via PowerPoint, once served as an imperfect but useful indication that a candidate cared enough about the opportunity to invest significant time and energy into creating the deliverable. What may have taken someone days to produce just a few years ago can now be drafted far more quickly with AI tools, making the finished presentation a less reliable measure of the candidate’s preparation or interest in the role. Today, an unpolished document may say more about a candidate’s unfamiliarity with AI tools than it does about their interest in the opportunity. 

False Positive #2: Authorship 

Candidates are often provided with board materials, recent financial statements, and other company information before completing the exercise. Given the right inputs and prompts, even someone without the appropriate experience and qualifications may be able to produce a document and plan that appears credible at first glance. As a result, hiring teams must decide how much of the strategy truly reflects the candidate’s original thinking and judgment, and how much was guided purely by AI. 

AI use itself isn’t problematic. In many leadership roles, using AI effectively demonstrates valuable technological fluency. The challenge is determining whether the candidate understands the recommendations, has examined the assumptions, and can take responsibility for the decisions the plan proposes. 

Given these two limitations, the exercise holds more value as a discussion tool than as a standalone deliverable. 

How Hiring Teams Can Adapt 

To account for the reduced reliability of these signals, boards, investors, and hiring teams can strengthen their assessment in four concrete ways:

1. Recalibrate the Scorecard: Whether it’s a growth strategy, a value creation plan, or a turnaround, the scorecard should always reflect what the executive is being hired to deliver. Hiring teams should agree in advance on how much the exercise will influence the candidate scorecard, and whether the 30-60-90 day plan should carry as much weight as it traditionally has. Within the exercise itself, more weight should be placed on the candidate’s ability to explain the assumptions behind the plan, articulate tradeoffs, connect priorities to relevant experience, and respond thoughtfully to questions. Hiring teams should also prioritize more concrete and verifiable evidence, including the candidate’s track record, relevant experience, notable accomplishments, and references. 

2. Use a Live Case Study Discussion: Presenting candidates with a relevant but unfamiliar business scenario, one they haven’t had time to prepare for, can reveal how they structure a problem, identify missing information, and weigh competing priorities, without a prepared document to serve as a crutch, or, more importantly, AI serving as a thought partner.

3. Introduce New Data and Curveballs: Candidates will likely be prepared to answer questions about their plan, even if AI helped shape it. Hiring teams can test their ownership of the strategy by introducing new information that complicates the original assumptions, revealing whether they can adapt a position they’ve already committed to. What changes if an acquisition is delayed, a key leader leaves, or the board reduces the investment available? Ask what they would revise, what they would preserve, and why.

4. Establish Clear Expectations for AI Use: Hiring teams should be transparent about whether candidates are permitted to use AI in developing the plan. If its use is allowed, asking candidates how they used it and what they changed, rejected, or challenged can provide another valuable window into their judgment and working style. The goal is not to police the use of AI, but to understand the role AI played in shaping the final product. Hiring teams should also ensure candidates are not uploading sensitive or confidential company information into these platforms without the appropriate privacy settings and safeguards.

Where the Real Signal Lies 

A document can be polished, rehearsed, or AI-assisted long before anyone sees it; a live response to an unfamiliar scenario or unplanned complication is much harder to manufacture in advance. 

As AI makes prepared materials less useful as a differentiator, the candidate’s ability to explain, adapt, and apply the thinking behind the plan is what matters most. Hiring teams need to be deliberate about how they approach this traditional exercise and interpret the results, as failure to do so increases the risk of false positives and a bad hire.