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 see what the last one actually cost.
This tool produces planning estimates from your inputs and published benchmark ranges. It is not an accounting of actual damages.
Total = recruiting costs + onboarding costs + unproductive wages + replacement cost. Wages are loaded at 1.25x salary to reflect employer taxes and benefits, then multiplied by your unproductive-share estimate. Replacement cost uses SHRM-consistent ranges: roughly 30% of salary for entry roles up to 150% and beyond for leadership.
Team disruption, customer damage, manager time absorbed, 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.
The number's job is to justify prevention spending: structured interviews, work samples, and disciplined reference checks cost a fraction of one bad hire. If your hiring process is informal, this calculator is the business case for fixing it.
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.
Almost never. The unproductive-wage line grows every month, and the team's tolerance depletes faster than the budget. The honest comparison is replacement cost now versus replacement cost later plus accumulated drag.
Real, and manageable: documentation, consistent process, and a pre-termination review keep the separation from adding a claim to the loss. That review is exactly what our employee relations service does.
Book a no-cost 30-minute consult. Bring your result, and leave with a straight read on the risk and a practical next step.