When you let a qualified candidate slip away and hire a mismatch instead, a few predictable things happen: First, you invest in a few weeks or months of training. During this time, your promising candidate struggles to learn the ropes and adapt to your company culture. He or she becomes increasingly frustrated, restless, or otherwise disengaged, and your teams consequently take on greater burdens in order to pick up the slack and maintain group productivity. Morale suffers, team cohesion frays, work goes undone or done poorly, and within one year, the mismatched hire has disappeared out the door. At that point, you have no choice but to start over from square one.

This is an exhausting and expensive process…But just how expensive is it, really? Before you launch into your next candidate search, take out a calculator and estimate the actual cost of this simple mistake. Take these factors into account.

Hiring Costs

Are you sourcing and selecting candidates by yourself? Are you enlisting the help of a team or contracting with a professional recruiter? If you’re choosing the first option, keep in mind that every minute you spend on this process will need to be taken away from other projects. Every dollar you spend will need to be reallocated away from another priority. Publishing a post, reviewing resumes, and interviewing candidates are all labor intensive projects.

Training Costs

In the early stages of her employment, your new recruit will naturally function as a liability rather than an asset. Newbie mistakes are necessary and expensive. And the trainer or supervisor assigned to watch over the new employee will have to be drawn away from other responsibilities. Meanwhile, new candidates often work for a year or more before their productivity levels rise to point that matches their full-time salary.

Opportunity and Time Costs

If your candidate leaves before the end of one calendar year, and he hasn’t contributed anything of value during that time, he doesn’t just walk out the door with your training investment and salary in his pocket; he also walks out the door with an entire year of activity that can’t be attributed to company growth. Essentially, the candidate you hire to replace him will now consume the cost of two training years, not just one.

Morale and Turnover

Depending on the reach and responsibilities of the position, a mismatched hire can wear on the patience and morale of your entire team. At best, frustrated employees will recover after the hiring mistake is corrected. But at worst, some of them may start looking for other jobs.

Hire the right candidate…the first time. For help and guidance, turn to the experienced staffing team at Expert Staffing.