A single bad hire can cost you 15 months and millions of dollars.

Consider the math: three months to hire, three to ramp up, three to realize it’s a poor fit, three of coaching to try and salvage the situation, and three to finally part ways. After more than a year, you’re back at square one, and the work you hired for remains undone.

This isn't a theoretical problem. A friend, a three-time founder, puts it best: "David, if you think competence is expensive, you should see how expensive incompetence is." The cost isn't just time; it can run into millions of dollars, take a toll on morale, and damage a company's reputation with customers and investors.

This failure is not the candidate's fault. It is a failure of fit, and that responsibility rests squarely with the manager. If the bad hire is a manager, the damage multiplies. For executive roles, the impact is exponential. It takes longer to spot, and in the meantime, they can weaken their entire team. Remember the rule: A-players hire A-players, but B-players hire C-players. The initial mistake cascades, affecting employees, customers, and the bottom line.

I have been 18 years at Google, and I believe its long-term success is rooted in an obsessive focus on hiring. As a senior executive there said 15 years ago, "Hire great people and get out of the way." This wasn't just a slogan. When the company had over 5,000 employees, a hiring committee still reviewed every single candidate package. Hiring managers had to justify their choices. The process had friction by design, because they understood that getting it right was the most important thing.

This reinforces the core principle: hiring is the manager's most important job. But if getting it right is so critical, why do so many companies still fail? Because historically, assessing for fit has been more art than science, relying on gut feel and inconsistent interviews.

This is what we aim to change. As I join Board&Leaders, I’m excited about the immense possibilities that AI, neuroscience, and Virtual Reality bring to the hiring process. We can now bring science to what was considered an art, making world-class leadership assessment available to everyone and ensuring talent is not just identified, but placed in a position to succeed from day one.

And yet, “bad hiring” isn’t the only hidden cost. There’s another one —when you fail to identify the talent you already have inside your company. In another post I'll explore the role of good managers in recognizing and developing the potential that's right in front of them.

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By David Robles Fosg, Partner

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Supporting Research:

• Frequency of bad hires (CareerBuilder): 74% of companies admit to having hired the wrong person.
• Cost of low employee engagement (Gallup): Disengaged employees cost the global economy trillions in lost productivity.
• Cause of employee turnover (Harvard Business Review): 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions.
• Manager impact on engagement (Gallup): Managers are responsible for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement.
• Reason for leaving a job (Gallup): 1 in 2 employees has left a job to get away from their manager.‍
• Total cost of a bad hire (SHRM): The total cost can be up to twice the employee's annual salary.
• A bad hire can cost as much as 30%: For a position with a $100,000 annual salary, that’s a $30,000 loss right off the bat.

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