Bad Hire Cost Calculator

The calculator adds seven costs you actually incurred: (1) recruiting spend to fill the seat the first time; (2) onboarding and training time, valued at what the people delivering it cost; (3) salary and employer burden paid across the months the person was in the role, discounted by the share of the job they were actually doing; (4) management time spent supervising, documenting and exiting them; (5) severance or notice pay; (6) the productivity your team lost while covering and coaching; and (7) the cost of doing the whole hire again, including the weeks the seat sits empty. Each line is shown separately so you can challenge any one of them.

Because a bad hire is rarely delivering nothing. If someone was doing roughly half the job for eight months, the loss is the half they were not doing — not the whole salary. Counting the full salary as waste inflates the number and makes the result easy to dismiss. The "share of the role actually delivered" input is what separates a defensible figure from a scary one.

Burden is everything you pay on top of base salary: employer payroll taxes, health and retirement contributions, equipment, software seats, and allocated overhead. For US employers it commonly lands between 20% and 35% of base salary. Use your own finance figure if you have one — this is the input most likely to be known precisely inside your business.

No. The calculator starts at the point you made the hire, because that is the decision being measured. The vacancy cost it does include is the second one — the weeks the seat sits empty again while you backfill, which is a direct consequence of the bad hire and would not have happened otherwise.

Enter how many colleagues were meaningfully affected and roughly what share of their time went into covering, correcting or coaching. A team of four losing 10% of their time for six months is a real cost with a real number attached. If nobody was affected, leave it at zero — an honest zero is better than a padded estimate.

The calculator shows the total as a multiple of the role’s annual salary so you can compare it to the ranges commonly quoted, but it derives that multiple from your inputs rather than assuming one. If your result is well below or above what you have read, the line-by-line breakdown shows exactly which cost is driving the difference.

Two things move it most: shortening the time between the hire not working and the decision being made, and reducing how much of the cycle you repeat. The calculator makes the first visible — change the "months in role" input and watch the salary and management lines move. Structured scorecards, a documented probation review, and a shorter feedback loop are what shorten it in practice.

Yes, and the breakdown is the reason. A single total is easy to argue with; seven lines each traceable to an input you chose are not. Export the figures into your own deck, or book a demo and our team will model your actual hiring funnel and turnover against them.