That's 20% for recruiting and hiring.
What is the cost of a bad hire, though?
What is the cost of a bad hire, though?
I’ve been in a situation where we needed somebody right now to backfill someone who left, and the company agonized over who to hire, taking over a month and blowing through dozens of candidates, ensuring that the product schedule slipped and losing us an untold amount of revenue.
They ended up being pretty weak, having trouble shipping, eating large amounts of onboarding and management attention, as well as other engineers patching up their work to make it serviceable. They were just good enough to make it seem worth the slog too, so they sucked a bunch of extra labor out of everyone else for the better part of a year before they left.
In retrospect, I made the right decision with what I knew in the moment — but with 20/20 hindsight I should have waited.