Home/Recruiting/Cost of a bad hire

Most owners are out by a factor of three.

Six numbers you already know. The total appears below as you type — before you give us anything, and whether or not you ever talk to us.

The six numbers

Use your own currency. The arithmetic is the same.

Gross annual salary for the role What the role costs on paper, for a full year.

Months they stayed From the first day to the last, including the months when you already knew.

Cost of the search Agency fee, adverts, and the hours you and your managers spent interviewing.

Onboarding and training invested Courses, tools, and the time of whoever brought them up to speed.

Months to replace and ramp up the next person The seat is empty or half-productive for this long. Usually longer than people expect.

Revenue lost or work redone Your estimate: the deals that slipped, the customers who noticed, the work someone else did twice.

What it actually cost

Salary paid while it was not working0

Cost of the search0

Onboarding and training0

The seat, empty or half-productive0

Revenue lost or work redone0

Total0

What this figure leaves out

It is a floor, not a ceiling.

Everything above is money you can point at. The part that does not fit in a spreadsheet is usually bigger: the good people who watched it happen and drew their own conclusion about how decisions get made here.

Some of them left within the year, and that resignation went in the books as something else entirely.

Method

How the number is worked out

Salary paid while it was not working = annual salary ÷ 12 × months they stayed.
The empty seat = annual salary ÷ 12 × months to replace and ramp up. The role is budgeted and not producing.
Search, training and lost revenue are taken exactly as you entered them.
Nothing is multiplied by a hidden factor, and no industry average is used. Every figure on the right is one you typed or a division by twelve.
Employer contributions, severance and legal costs are not included: they differ by country, and inventing an average would make the total look precise when it is not.

How to not pay it again

The interview is not the problem. What it cannot see is.

A CV tells you what someone has done. An interview tells you how they present. Neither tells you how a person decides under pressure, what they do when the plan breaks, or which manager they will work well for — and those are the three things that decide the first ninety days.

I-Profile reads them before you sign. It is ours: built by HR professionals, not licensed from anyone.

Read a candidate before you hire them How we rebuild hiring

The one-page brief

What to watch in the first ninety days.

The early signals of a wrong hire show up long before anyone says it out loud. This is the page that names them, and says what to do the week you realise you got it wrong.

The three signals that appear before month three
What to do the week you realise, and in what order
The breakdown you just calculated, attached

One page. No sequence, and no follow-up you did not ask for.