Bad hires are expensive.
Here's the math.
Most teams only count the recruiter invoice. The real bill includes months of salary that bought nothing, the team that carried the load, and the search you now have to run again.
Hired through an agency?
Adds a typical placement fee to the sunk cost.
$37,500
≈ 0.6× their annual salary
40% of 6 months' pay
supervision, rework, second-guessing
recruiting + onboarding
you're doing it all again
One file. Works on any computer, no internet needed.
infoHow this is calculated
This is an estimate, not an invoice. We assume a bad hire delivers roughly 60% of expected output (so 40% of their pay bought nothing), managers and teammates lose time worth about 25% of that same pay to supervision and rework, and each hiring round costs about 15% of annual salary in internal recruiting and onboarding effort — plus a typical 18% placement fee if an agency was involved.
Published estimates for the total cost of a bad hire range from 15–24% of salary (Robert Half Australia, 2021) to 3–4× salary once manager time is counted (SHRM, 2022). The one-day-a-week manager drag comes from a Robert Half CFO survey. This calculator deliberately sits at the conservative end. Your real number is probably higher — here's the full research breakdown.