The costs of bad hires are well documented. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has famously estimated that better hiring decisions could have saved his company well over $100 million. In smaller companies, bad hires can threaten the entire business by scaring off customers or bungling deals. Here are five ways that bad hires can have a negative impact on your customers and, thus, your bottom line:
- Negative direct customer interactions
First and foremost, bad hires who deal directly with customers are toxic for your business. A bad hire might have a poor attitude or they might be lazy in attending to a customer’s needs. Whenever a customer has a bad experience with one of your employees, it reflects upon the company as a whole and is very likely to make you lose that customer, not to mention any other potential customers with whom the first customer might share their experience. We only need to watch that United video to understand the possible repercussions of one very bad move.
- Negative indirect interactions
If your bad hire is anywhere in the line of people who work with customers, their actions will ultimately have an effect on your customers. For example, if a bad hire is disorganized and misplaces customer information or misses deadlines that are important to the customer, they don’t need to interact with the customer directly to lose their business.
- Negative impact on the workplace attitude
If someone that you hire has a bad attitude, that can have a huge effect on the people that they work with, hurting productivity and morale. Whether they are simply negative, tell inappropriate jokes, or actually bully or harass other employees, a bad hire can suck the joy out of a work environment for everyone, which ultimately effects the customer.
- Creating more work for everyone
Bad hires who always have an excuse to be absent or who can never seem to get their work done on time end up creating more work for the people around them. This also effects company morale, and it makes it more likely that your customer has to wait longer for a lower quality product, because people aren’t doing the jobs that they’re supposed to.
- Driving up costs
Bad hires cost lost wages, lost productivity, and the costs of finding a replacement. Those costs trickle down to the customer, hurting everyone’s bottom line.
Hiring assessments are a key tool for avoiding the costs of bad hires. With assessments for hiring, employers can get a more complete picture of the candidates they’re considering, looking past overt qualifications to character, work style, and decision-making skills.
Learn more about your own decision-making skills this month with a a preview of our Judgmentcompass assessment. You’ll see just how useful the information provided can be.
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