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Experiment 08 · feeds Culture

The Cost of a Bad Hire.

What does turnover really cost you?

The role

$
$45,000$400,000
Seniority
mo
hires

One bad hire at this level costs around

$61,200

That's 0.7× the salary - in line with research that puts a bad hire anywhere from 30% of first-year earnings (US Dept of Labor) to 2× salary and beyond for senior roles.

× the salary

0.7×

Biggest line

Lost output

Your hires/yr

3

Yearly exposure*

$36,720

*If roughly 1 in 5 hires misses - the commonly cited rate. Halving your miss rate is worth $18,360/yr.

Where the money goes

Recruitmentads, recruiter fees, screening, interview time$17,000
Onboarding & trainingsetup, systems, the ramp that never pays off$8,500
Lost productivity5 months at a fraction of a good hire's output$21,250
Team disruption & management dragthe cost everyone feels but nobody invoices$10,200
Exit costsnotice, admin, possible payout$4,250
Total cost of one miss$61,200
How this is calculated＋

Each component is a percentage of salary that scales with seniority - recruitment 15–33%, onboarding ~10%, team disruption 8–30%, exit ~5% - plus lost output while the wrong person is in the seat (we assume they deliver ~40% of what a good hire would, for the months you set).

  • The US Department of Labor puts a bad hire at ~30% of first-year earnings; SHRM estimates replacement alone at 50–60% of salary with total costs up to 200%+.
  • None of this counts the customers, reputation or good people a bad hire can take with them.
  • The cheapest fix is upstream: hiring discipline and a culture that keeps the good ones.

The durable fix is a team people don't want to leave. LINK Culture builds the systems behind that.

Talk to Culture →

An indicative model built on published research ranges - real costs vary by role, industry and how long a poor fit stays. If anything, senior-role estimates here are conservative.