For obvious reasons, most companies focus the majority of their attention on increasing revenue.

However, one of the least complicated, and often disregarded, ways a company can lose revenue is by making bad hires.

Poor hiring decisions are like a hidden tax on your company. Obviously, they cost a business in terms of wasted resources spent hiring and training someone. But they also cost companies in terms of lower productivity and a disrupted workplace.

Lost productivity

On average, it takes a new worker more than a year to become completely effective in their new role. That long onboarding time means your new worker will make hundreds or thousands of decisions before you know if they’re the right person for the job. Once you recognize you’ve made a bad hire, you could have lost millions of dollars in unrealized productivity you can never get back.

In customer service positions, a bad hire’s effect is more immediate, and the risk is substantial since the impact of the bad hire’s decisions can fan out across your customer base in the form of negative word-of-mouth.

Moreover, bad hires can cause manager burnout. Functioning in today’s workplace is already demanding enough. When supervisors have to continuously recruit and train new employees as a result of turnover brought on by poor hiring decisions, its places a heavy and unnecessary burden on them.

Workplace disruptions

By far the greatest damage caused by a bad hire is the problems they cause to your company’s culture. In a study by CareerBuilder, 95 percent of surveyed organizations claimed that a bad hire adversely impacted their company culture.

Management can dedicate years setting up a working environment that embodies the company’s core values, and one wrong hire can serve as a wrecking ball that smashes all that work to bits.

Top performers generally don’t want to collaborate with those who don’t have the skills or the right mindset. When you add disruptors or low performers into the mix, the best employees are ones whose jobs are made harder when productivity slips or conflicts pop up. These problems can end up costing top employees real dollars in the form of incentives or commissions.

As opposed to plowing through the losses, they’ll typically start looking for a different company.

Avoid rushing to minimize bad hires

The best way to avoid a bad hire is to take time with the hiring process. Hiring managers who are feeling pressure to make a fast hire need to address the source of that pressure so they can hire right the first time.

With sufficient time, a hiring manager can thoroughly vet all prospective candidates, interviewing and checking references as need be.

Another great way to avoid a bad hire is through working with the right supply chain recruiter. Contact ZDA today to work with a leader in supply chain recruitment and learn about the benefits we provide when finding the right candidate for your job opening.

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