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The Cost of a Bad Hire: Why the Wrong Person Costs More Than You Think-and How to Choose the Right One
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 14 2026
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.38
Height: 0.25 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
It took six days to hire him. It took $194,300 to find out.
Tyler Grant interviewed well. He was friendly, confident, and fluent in the language of the job. One five-minute reference call confirmed what everyone wanted to hear, and the offer went out six days after the post opened, because the night shift could not wait.
Five months later, the night shift had logged eleven stoppages longer than an hour. When the CFO added up the overtime, the idle crews, the late-delivery penalties, the colleague quietly covering for him, and the price of hiring again, the total was $194,300. Nearly three times his salary.
Tyler was not dishonest. He was not lazy. He was hired into a job he could not yet do, by a process that never checked whether he could.
Most bad hires are not chosen carelessly. They are chosen quickly, by capable people, with whatever evidence happens to be in the room.
The Cost of a Bad Hire is a practical, evidence-based guide to hiring for every role without direct reports: the technicians, analysts, specialists, coordinators, and drivers who do an organization's real work. It shows you how to put a dollar figure on a bad hire that your finance team will accept, and how to stop making them.
Inside, you will learn how to:
- Calculate what a bad hire really costs with a conservative five-part calculator built for real budgets.
- Decide whether to hire at all before pressure makes the decision for you.
- Define the role before anyone applies, including the standard, the measures, and the pay.
- Apply the Al Badi Three-Expert Recruitment Model(TM) three independent experts, two gates, one rating scale, and decision rules fixed before any candidate is known.
- Test, observe, and interview in the right order, from the knowledge test to the competency and behavioral interviews.
- Resolve close calls fairly when two strong candidates are separated by less than half a point.
- Turn a good choice into a productive employee and check, one year later, whether the decision was right.
Every chapter follows one company, SaidCo, from the night the line stopped to the end of its new technician's first year, so you see each step applied to a real decision. Fourteen ready-to-use templates, from the Hiring Readiness Review to the Bad Hire Cost Calculator, let you put the model to work on your very next vacancy.
Written for business owners, executives, HR leaders, hiring managers, and anyone who serves on a hiring panel. A companion to The Cost of Weak Leadership, which applies the same evidence-based discipline to every role that leads people.
Completely revised second edition.
Your next hiring decision is probably days away. Make it the first one decided on evidence.
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