Effective recruiting is an important part of your overall business strategy. But to fully understand just what kind of impact it has, you need to understand the cost of making a wrong hiring decision. In addition to impacting your bottom line, a bad hire can have the following consequences.

Workforce Disruptions

The exact reason someone is a bad hire can vary, but in most cases it’s because they can’t get along with your current staff. They create friction, introduce conflicts, and degrade morale overall. That can have an impact on your overall productivity that is impossible to measure, but also impossible to resolve until the bad hire is out of your organization. In the worst cases it can lead to quality, long-term employees leaving your company.

Termination Disputes

If you take the initiative to let the bad hire go, they may not be willing to go quietly. That can lead to termination disputes that expose you to legal costs and raise security concerns. Some of these risks are remote, but in almost all cases their exit will be dramatic.

Damaging Vacancies

Once the bad hire is out of your company, you will have to contend with a hole on your workforce. If they had a relatively low-level position, this may be possible to overcome, but at the very least your other employees will have to work harder to pick up the slack. And if they had a higher level position that is suddenly open, it may be impossible for your company to operate anywhere close to full strength. The effects of a single vacancy can ripple through an entire organization.

Expensive Recruiting

Now that you are scrambling to complete your workforce you will have to start the recruiting process all over again. In even the best circumstances, this process can be time and labor intensive, and produce uncertain results (as you well know). But those effects are only exasperated when you have to rush the process. You have to frequently pull together any kind of candidate pool you can and hope that a qualified candidate is somewhere in the bunch. If one is not, you may have to settle on someone, which runs the risk of starting this process all over again.

The good news is that there are proven strategies to improve your recruiting process, abridge the amount of time it takes, and produce higher-caliber, more reliable candidates. To learn about these strategies, contact RennerBrown, but don’t wait until you are desperate to make a hire.