The cost of new hires: pay it now or pay it later

Do we remember the bitter-sweet experience of hiring a new person?

The bitter: The costs to advertise for the position, sift through the resumes, the interview process...the training process.

The sweet:
The opportunity and possibility you saw for this new position?

The sign that your company is growing!  And there was always the sense that at-best you were rolling the dice with each new employee hired.

And that last point: your company is growing. It gave an urgency to your quest. How many of us heard, or gave, the directive to hurry up and get someone in that position fast!

And how often did that directive, when carried out, end up in disaster? We rushed through interviews, assumed the references spoke well, minimized that quirky answer, ignored the candidate's nervous twitch or their sketchy background. And then spent months cleaning up the results from demoralized co-workers, unhappy customers, lost revenues, lost sales, or worse.

And for a small company, the impact of new hire is even greater. One new person in a company of 10 or 15 employees has a much more immediate impact throughout the company than a new hire in a company of 10,000 employees.

Brad Smart, author of Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People, quantifies the reminder that you always pay the costs for new hires. The only question is whether you pay it now or pay it later.

Paying it now, with a thorough interview process, is much much cheaper. You can save as much as $60,000 per hour with the Topgrading hiring process.

I've used it with success, in the past, 4 out of 4 times. It's well worth the time investment.

You can listen to Brad Smart's conversation with me on BlogTalk Radio last year.