Hiring Without a Strategy Will Kill Your Company
March 7, 2016
By Your business is doing well — your customer base is booming, your product’s popularity is soaring, and the world is your oyster … except your company can’t keep up.
If you are in high-growth mode, you’re going to need more people. At the same time, the competition for talent has never been fiercer. That means incredible pressure for companies today to hire as many people as they can, as quickly as they can to lock prospects down before anyone else snaps them up.
Don’t make that mistake. We all know, theoretically, that making a bad hire sets companies back. Simply put, a bad hire (someone who lacks the skills or drive to get the job done, or is not a fit with your culture) won’t move you forward and in fact may move you backwards. But most companies have no idea the impact of a single bad hire has on their business. Believe it or not, data shows that the average cost of a bad hire is up to five times that person’s annual salary!
That’s a pretty sobering statistic, but in the midst of a company growth spurt when the pressure’s on, it’s easy to default to making the first hire instead of the right one. You may think, “So what if we make a few bad hires? — we’ll take care of it later.” The problem with that approach is that bad hires almost never end up having zero impact — they have negative impact instead.
The Real Cost of Bad Hires
Most mangers think that if they hire quickly and fill a role, then they’ve plugged a hole. People think, “Someone’s better than no one, and even if they turn out to be a bad hire we’ll just replace them.”
In reality this plays out as follows:
- It takes you six months to truly figure out that the person is a bad hire.