The Department of Labor puts a bad hire at 30% of first-year earnings minimum; for skilled roles the real number runs far higher. Put your own numbers in, and find out whether this was a hiring miss or a role that keeps failing.
This tool produces planning estimates from your inputs and published benchmark ranges. It is not an accounting of actual damages.
Total = recruiting costs + manager/coworker time cost + unproductive wages + replacement cost + other direct costs. Wages are loaded at 1.25x salary to reflect employer taxes and benefits, then multiplied by the unproduced share of expected output. Replacement cost uses SHRM-consistent ranges from 30% of salary for entry roles to 150% and beyond for leadership.
Team disruption, customer damage, and morale effects on the people who worked around the problem. All real, all unpriced here, all reasons the on-screen number is a floor rather than a ceiling.
One bad hire is usually a selection error: a résumé, an interview, or a reference check that missed something. The same role failing more than once in 24 months is a different problem: the job design, the hiring process, the onboarding plan, or the supervisor is not set up for anyone to succeed in that seat.
Any hire that separates or must be managed out within roughly the first year due to performance, conduct, or fit that a better process would have surfaced. The cost logic also applies to slow-motion bad hires who stay for years.
Define the role honestly before posting, use structured interviews scored against job criteria, require work samples for skill roles, actually call references, and run a 90-day onboarding plan with a real checkpoint decision.
Stop re-running the same hiring process and expecting a different outcome. Review the job description against the actual work, the interview questions against real failure points, and whether the supervisor over this role has the capacity and skill to set someone up to succeed.
Real, and manageable: documentation, consistent process, and a pre-termination review keep the separation from adding a claim to the loss.
Book a no-cost 30-minute consult. Bring your result, and leave with a straight read on the risk and a practical next step.