A single misplaced engineer or operations leader can cost your company months of productivity. Here’s how to calculate and prevent this.
The fully loaded cost of a bad hire in infrastructure routinely runs 3–5x annual salary once you account for project delays, rework, team disruption, and replacement search. For a senior engineering or ops role at $180K, that’s a $540K–$900K event.
The biggest hidden cost is project drag. A misaligned senior leader doesn’t just underperform — they make slow or wrong decisions that ripple through the project for months before the issue is named. By the time the role is backfilled, the schedule is already compressed and the recovery cost is locked in.
Prevent it at the front of the process. Structured intake, scorecard-based interviewing, and reference work that actually probes failure modes — not just confirmations — is what separates a 70% hit rate from a 95% one.
If this is showing up in your own hiring, we can run a short diagnostic and tell you what we'd do.
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