Salary paid over those 6 months: $35,000.
The share of the salary you paid that didn't turn into output: a mis-hire underperforming and disrupting others. 100% treats the whole salary as wasted.
Hours the manager and teammates spent supervising, correcting, and covering, valued at their loaded pay rate.
Doing the search over again: fees, advertising, and interviewing time for the replacement.
Total cost of this bad hire
$46,000
Cost breakdown
- Lost productivity during tenure
- $21,000
- Recruiting & agency cost
- $5,000
- Onboarding & training
- $3,000
- Manager & team time
- $4,000
- Severance & exit cost
- $5,000
- Re-hiring the replacement
- $8,000
Every line is an input you control, so treat the total as a defensible estimate, not a precise figure. Estimates of a bad hire's cost run from a few months of pay to well over a year's salary because the total depends so heavily on the role, so model your own numbers rather than borrowing a headline figure.
Powered by TeamPredict · Get the full calculator →