A bad hire can be a costly affair. Recruiting the right candidate can be exhausting. Keep your eyes on the main goal: getting the right employee who adds value to your company.

“We can never fall short when it comes to recruiting, hiring, maintaining and growing our workforce. It is the employees who make our organization’s success a reality.”

― Vern Dosch, Wired Differently

Hiring the right employee for your business is not less than a tedious task. However, there is stiff competition for top candidates these days. Companies struggle to find and keep quality talent. Even though HR professionals use many different hiring formulas to hunt down the best person, sometimes you may end up with the wrong hire. Nothing is more disappointing than realising the person you thought would be your next superstar isn’t even a one-hit-wonder.

A bad hire can not only a challenge and time-consuming issue but also cost the company a lot of money and adds pressure to the process. It becomes one of the most expensive mistakes that can have a devastating effect on your business. Consider the impact a bad hire can cause you in the following four areas of your business.

Hiring bad eggs can impact your ability to hire top talent in the future.Greg Brockman, Stripe CTO

The impact a bad hire can cause in your business

• Decreased productivity

If a person narrated in a CV is not who the candidate really is, they may not be able to perform well in the job role that you are hiring them. It could harm productivity, as other employees need to work harder to meet the targets and deadlines, damaging group morale. Bad hires can drive the top employers away, often right into the hands of the competition, taking the skills, knowledge and expertise that you have helped develop with them. A bad hire can also lower the standards of the rest of the team.

• Impact on customers

Bad hires can’t seem to clasp their responsibilities in the job role. Even if they can, they will always look for shortcuts, or making customers’ dismay due to their lack of customer service. The cost of acquiring new clients is way more expensive than keeping existing customers. One wrong interaction with a bad hire may cause the customers to walk away. Eventually, your brand and reputation will suffer.

• Cultural imbalance

Having cracks in the culture, because other members don’t add value to the team, can harm the whole workforce.

• Ensure that the new hires have the right experience and qualifications to meet the requirements of the role.
• Assess how they will fit in with your company’s culture and your colleagues.

Both these points should be at the top of your list of priorities when you make the hiring decision.

• Time Spent on Performance Management

A bad hire will suck up the time and focus of an employer. Instead of coaching and developing other employees, he gets sucked into an endless cycle of having to listen to complaints from others, gives corrective feedback, micromanaging, handing out discipline, and eventually get dragged through a painful disciplinary process. Trying to get a wrong hire to meet even minimum expectations is like playing management “whack-a-mole.” One problem may temporarily go away, but it soon gets replaced with another issue.

“If you make a hiring mistake, make the change quickly. Don’t ignore problems. Don’t assume it will get better.”

― Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics

• Reputation

Bad hires, especially those who are communicating with clients, can damage relationships if customers don’t get treated well. Relationships are not easy to rebuild once the trust has broken. Companies have to make sure that employees representing their business can enhance or maintain their reputation and goodwill, not harm it.

There is also internal reputation management that you need to consider. When a firm recruit and then subsequently keeps a lousy hire, colleagues can question the top-level management’s ability to make smart decisions. It can injure the relationship between the administration and the staff in a business.

• Financial impact

Lastly, let’s not forget the money. A hiring mistake can cost a business three times the person’s salary, due to the money spent on training, lost productivity and increased staff turnover.

So, whether you are hiring an entry-level employee or senior executive, the cost of a bad hire is high. It can bring down your team, manager, or the whole organisation. While there are no guarantees, taking more time to cast a wide net and doing your due diligence in finalising employees is well worth the effort and will minimize the chances of a bad hire.

“If you can hire people whose passion intersects with the job, they won’t require any supervision at all. They will manage themselves better than anyone could ever manage them. Their fire comes from within, not from without. Their motivation is internal, not external.”Stephen Covey

Reach us for your recruitment needs at Hand Phone: +91 7795547089 or Email us at team@bssrecruit.com.

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