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What does a bad hire actually cost your business?
A wrong hire rarely shows up as one line item — it's recruitment spend, months of ramp-up salary, lost output, manager hours, and then paying to recruit all over again. Adjust the numbers below to estimate what one is costing you.
Adjust the assumptions below.
≈ 0.56×this role's annual CTC — ₹5,03,846 in total.
- Original recruitment / agency cost
- ₹90,000
- Onboarding & ramp-up salary
- ₹2,07,692
- Productivity loss during tenure
- ₹46,154
- Manager & team time cost
- ₹60,000
- Replacement / re-hire cost
- ₹1,00,000
What it cost to source, screen, and hire them in the first place.
Full salary paid while they were still ramping up — a wasted investment once the hire didn't work out.
The estimated share of their post-ramp salary that produced sub-par or no net output.
Manager and teammate hours spent managing, correcting, or covering for them.
Recruiting, screening, and onboarding costs for the person who replaced them.
These figures are illustrative, editable assumptions — not a quote or a guarantee. See methodology & assumptions below.
How the total is built
What goes into the cost of a bad hire?
What's the original recruitment cost?
The agency fee (or internal recruiter time) spent finding, screening, and hiring them — money spent whether or not they worked out.
What's the onboarding & ramp-up cost?
Full salary paid while they were still ramping up to full productivity. Since the hire ultimately didn't work out, that investment produced no lasting return.
What's the productivity-loss cost?
For the rest of their time in the role, an estimated share of their salary bought sub-par or negative output rather than a good hire's normal contribution.
What's the manager & team time cost?
Hours a manager or teammates spent managing performance issues, redoing work, or covering gaps — real time pulled away from their own output.
What's the replacement cost?
Once they leave, the clock resets: you pay to recruit, screen, and onboard someone new — a second round of the same cost you just paid.
Methodology
How accurate are these numbers?
This calculator sums five plain-language cost components — nothing hidden, no secret multiplier. Every default below is an editable assumption, loosely shaped by commonly-cited HR/recruiting benchmarks, not a precise statistic from one study and not a claim about AxureOne's own placements. Real costs vary by role, seniority, and industry — treat the result as a directional, order-of-magnitude estimate, not a quote.
Recruitment & replacement cost
Defaulted to roughly 10-11% of annual CTC — in the neighborhood of commonly-cited external-hiring-cost benchmarks (agency fees in this range, or the equivalent in internal recruiter time), not a fixed rate.
Weeks to reach productivity
Defaulted to 12 weeks — within the 8-12-week window often referenced for a new hire to reach full output, though this varies a lot by seniority and role complexity.
Productivity shortfall
Defaulted to 50% — a mid-point illustrative estimate of how far a struggling hire's output can run below a good hire's, once nominally past onboarding.
Manager & team time, months stayed
These have no external benchmark baked in — they default to round, plausible starting numbers precisely because only you know your own team's situation. Change them first.
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