Hiring the wrong person costs more than you think…
- February 26, 2025
Right now, finding people is the easy bit. Finding the right person / people to ensure your business is successful, that’s the hard bit…
Get it right, and you’ve got someone who delivers, buys into your company culture, and ultimately makes a positive difference. Get it wrong, it can be expensive, time-consuming, and often hard to rectify.
So, before you put your advert up it’s worth thinking about what getting it wrong might actually cost.
1. Recruitment & Onboarding: The Upfront Spend
Before your new hire even starts, you’ve already spent significant time and money on them.
Advertising or paying a recruiter, reviewing CVs, interviewing - it all adds up. The CIPD estimates the average cost per hire in the UK is around £1,500, and that’s without factoring in the time spent by hiring managers who take time out of their schedule to interview and prepare assessments.
Then there’s onboarding - training, equipment, software licences - easily another £1,000+
2. Salary & Benefits:
If we take an average UK marketing salary at around £32,500. If someone leaves (or is let go) after six months, that’s £16,250 paid in salary alone, without necessarily seeing much, or even any return.
...And that’s before you count the hidden costs NI contributions, pension, training, and time lost to performance management.
3. Lost Productivity: The Silent Killer
A bad hire doesn’t just underperform - they can negatively affect everyone around them.
Studies suggest underperforming employees reduce team productivity by up to 30%.
If your marketing team is bringing in £200,000 in revenue per person annually, that’s £10,000–£15,000 lost due to inefficiency.
And if they’re client-facing? The impact on reputation can be even bigger.
4. The Cost of Doing It All Over Again
Once you’ve let them go, the cycle starts again - job ads, interviews, onboarding…
Hiring someone new means repeating recruitment costs (£1,500–£2,000).
Another 1–2 months of lost productivity while they get up to speed.
Realistically, a bad hire can easily cost £10,000 –£30,000 on top of their salary - and that’s being conservative.
5. The Knock-On Effect: Morale, Clients & Reputation
Money aside, a bad hire damages team morale, client relationships, and brand perception.
Good employees get frustrated, and sometimes, they leave. Clients notice mistakes, delays, or lack of enthusiasm.
Your reputation takes a hit, not least because the person leaving may not be singing your praises.
The Bottom Line? If you’re hiring, do everything you can to get it right
It sounds ridiculous, but even on the average marketing salary, a bad hire could end up costing £20,000–£40,000 when you factor in recruitment, lost productivity, and the cost of replacement.
That’s why it pays (literally) to get hiring right the first time. Take the time to put together a hiring process that is robust enough to properly assess the candidates, but quick enough to ensure you don’t lose them during the process.
At Stonor we can’t claim to always get it right, but since we started keeping records in 2014, 92% of the people we've placed have still been in position a year later, which is why we can offer 100% refund if it doesn’t work out during the probation period.