The Cost of a Bad Hire
When you make a bad hire, the whole company suffers. Although it’s not possible to bring the perfect candidate on board every single time, even just one mistake has the potential to negatively impact your business in multiple ways.
Bad Hiring Puts a Burden on Your Budget
If you think replacing an underperforming employee only costs a fraction of his or her salary, you’re missing the big picture. Some estimates suggest that the cost of making poor hiring decisions can be as much as $240,000 per person. This includes both salary and the costs associated with the impact of subpar performance, such as:
- Customers and sales lost
- Projects being held up or left unfinished
- Negative impacts on your brand’s reputation
- Legal fees
All the time spent on recruitment, training and onboarding for each new hire is also lost, creating a hefty price tag for candidates who aren’t a good fit for your company.
Bad Hiring Undermines Company Culture
Hiring someone without the dedication or work ethic to pull his or her weight as part of a team means everyone else has to shoulder neglected responsibilities. This can breed resentment, create schisms in otherwise healthy and productive teams, damage employee relationships and undermine the team spirt needed to support healthy collaboration. Staff members taking on the work of underperforming employees may begin to view supervisors and executives as incompetent and lose the desire to uphold the long-term visions of the company.
Bad Hiring Chases Top Talent Away
You want to attract top talent to your business and keep them on staff, but the presence of poor performers can cause your best people to seek employment elsewhere. When one member of a team is constantly holding everyone else back, it doesn’t take long for the rest of the team to become disgruntled and decide that their skills could be better utilized elsewhere.
Bad Hiring Damages the Customer Experience
One bad customer service experience can turn into a reputation nightmare in today’s world of online reviews and viral social sharing. When customers encounter a negative employee, they aren’t likely to have the kind of experience that you want your company to be known for. Instead, they associate the level of service they receive with the overall quality of your business and begin to seek products and services elsewhere to avoid having another negative exchange.
What can you do to avoid a bad hire? Make a robust ATS software platform the heart of your recruitment process. Instead of treating hiring like a shot in the dark and hoping the perfect application lands on your desk, you can use an ATS recruitment program to narrow down your choices to candidates with the right qualifications. When your hiring process is guided by a powerful system with the ability to pinpoint the best candidates for every position, your company becomes more efficient and attracts the talent necessary to achieve the growth you desire.