What Is The Cost of Bad Hire During Pandemic?Image

What Is The Cost of Bad Hire During Pandemic?

The cost of hiring the wrong person during a pandemic is not only the damage you leave behind but also future loss. The worst-case scenario with a poorly selected candidate would be that they cause harm to your organization.

Sad to say,  approximately 75% of hiring managers admitted that they had terrible hires, as per Robert Half. According to the same source, most of them did not even realize they made a bad hire until the employee had worked there for more than six months. Perhaps, the candidate hid something that gave her away later.

Realistically, it could be that the candidate has learned the ropes and was only too obvious about their behavior after they were hired. Regardless of the reason, poor hiring decisions are costly, both in terms of lost productivity and morale. Other negative implications may include legal trouble, damaged reputation, and even dismissal of the employee.

The Bigger Picture

Getting back to the original question, what is the cost of a bad hire? Let's take a look at some real-life examples to see how much it cost their organizations. What is the price of a bad hire? Let's look at a company that hired a so-called "account executive" for a position paying $125,000 per year. On paper, this looked like a good hire.

After working for three months, she started to fall asleep at her desk after lunch regularly. Her boss and several employees observed this behavior who regularly pass by that part of the company during lunch break. Not only that, the client was unhappy with her work and told her so. Her performance had worsened after she started working there. As per her boss, she was doing anything to get the client's attention yelling at him over the phone.

Later, she was asked to meet with ten other office staff and a client's consultant. The client got angry with her over the poor performance and fired her the next day.

In this case, she cost the company $20,000 within three months. While this may not be much in the context of the cost of hiring, she wasted six months of valuable time. Since she was unproductive before her termination, she could have been generating $25,000 per month if she had continued to work there. On top of that, she wasted company resources too. This means that her actual cost of hiring was at least $96,000. This does not even include the opportunity cost due to productivity loss if she had continued working there.

 It all sums up to a higher cost. This is the cost of a bad hire.

The organization also needs to put so much effort into recruiting a new employee. The recruiter, hiring manager, and HR manager were involved in the process. In this case, they spent 4 hours searching for a good candidate, 10 minutes to review the resume, 15 hours to set up an interview with 3 people, and 5 hours reviewing candidates.

Costs to the company may include the cost of recruiting, travel expenses, time of leadership team to reserve the office space for an interview, cost of interim staff to fill the vacancy, cost of training for interim staff, and additional support for operations.

How to prevent this from happening?

The result of this hiring fiasco would have been avoided had some basic processes been followed. Technology recruiters should have been more thorough during the vetting process. Questions should have been asked directly to the hiring team. The information that they should have got from the candidate should have been shared with other departments.

With these economic crises, recruitment agencies need to do their part to ensure that bad hires are prevented. Additionally, good candidates should be put through the fitting process. All the things mentioned should be included in the hiring tools used by technology recruiters to hire prolific people for your organization.

 Conclusion

The cost of bad hire includes both immediate and long-term consequences. In this instance, the organization had to deal with a disgruntled employee, an angry client, and less productivity from that employee.