We don’t talk enough about the real cost of a bad hire.
Most people understand the direct expenses: salary, onboarding, training, and the cost of backfilling when it doesn’t work out.
But that only scratches the surface.
A bad hire isn’t just a budgeting mistake. It’s a cultural hit. It affects morale. It shifts energy. It breaks trust. When someone is underperforming and nothing gets done about it, resentment sets in. People start asking, “How did this person even get hired? Why are they still here? And why am I the one cleaning up the mess?”
That resentment doesn’t just simmer. It spreads.
Now I’m covering for someone else, still pulling my weight, and watching them get paid just like I am. I’m frustrated. I’m questioning leadership. I’m disengaging.
And the worst part? I’m not alone. That frustration seeps into the team. The culture shifts—quietly, but quickly.
In smaller companies, these impacts hit even harder.
If I don’t get the report out, sales doesn’t have what they need to close. If marketing misses the brief, product delays the launch. In a small org, there's no buffer—every dropped ball lands hard, and fast. The impact isn’t theoretical. It’s immediate, and everyone feels it.
But even in larger organizations, the damage is diluted.
The problem doesn’t take longer to see—it just takes longer to solve. There are more layers. More legal risks. More people quietly absorbing the slack.
And that’s the trap. Because when the work still gets done, we don’t always realize the toll it’s taking on the people picking up the pieces.
And let’s not forget the most overlooked cost: time.
The amount of manager attention that low performers demand is staggering. And that time? It’s coming at the expense of your top talent. They notice who gets coached, who gets protected, and who gets your attention.
Eventually, your best people stop raising their hand. Not because they don’t care—but because it’s clear where the priorities lie.
Sometimes, the team just adapts. We lower the bar. We work around the problem instead of solving it.
We adjust deadlines. We shift responsibilities. We make excuses. And over time, we stop expecting excellence—we just try to survive.
That’s when dysfunction becomes normalized. And when that happens, it’s hard to course-correct. You can’t rebuild standards overnight after you’ve let them slide for too long.
You’ve built around the dysfunction instead of addressing it head-on.
I see this all the time in startups and early-stage teams. We hire who we can afford, not who we really need. We think we’ll backfill the gaps later. But what we’re actually doing is piling on workarounds—and none of them quite work.
Instead of hiring one strong VP, you hire three mid-level folks who can’t quite deliver. And now you’ve got a bloated structure, unclear ownership, and no clear path to success.
Bad hires are expensive. Not just in dollars, but in lost momentum, missed opportunities, and fractured trust.
So what do we do about it?
It starts before the interview.
Ask yourself:
- Have we clearly defined what this role needs to accomplish?
- Are we aligned on the outcomes—not just the job title?
- Are we hiring based on skills and performance—not personality?
Textio research found that 34% of interviewers comment on a candidate’s personality by the time they make an offer. That’s not objectivity—it’s bias. And bias leads to bad decisions.
At Textio, we’ve built tools to help hiring teams stay focused. Our Interview Feedback feature makes it easy to create clear, compliant, skills-based assessments—so you can make better hiring decisions, faster.
But let’s be honest—tools aren’t magic. It still takes leadership.
It takes intention to slow down and get hiring right. And it takes accountability to fix it when you get it wrong.
Because if you don’t deal with a bad hire, someone else will. And more often than not, the person paying the price is the one you can’t afford to lose.