What did your last mis-hire actually cost? Run your number.
The visible costs are the fee and the restart. The real costs are the quarter of carry, the team drag, the customer quality that slipped, and the leader hours spent managing around it.
A wrong leadership hire reverberates for 18 months. The cost is the mis-hire, not the search.
The visible costs.
The search fee
You pay it again. Every time. Most organizations absorb it as a cost of doing business without asking whether the decision is what failed.
The restart timeline
The seat goes empty or underperforms for another three to six months. The quarter moves without the leader it was supposed to have.
The real costs.
The quarter of carry
The mis-hire's salary, benefits, and overhead during the months before anyone acts on what was already visible from week four.
Team drag
Teams adapt to weak leadership. They lower their standards, work around the gap, and some of the best people start looking. The mis-hire costs more in what leaves than what stays.
Customer quality
In revenue or service roles, a wrong hire touches customers, loses accounts, and sets expectations you spend the next year correcting.
Leader hours
Every hour a senior leader spent managing, coaching, or protecting around the mis-hire is an hour not running their own mandate. Invisible on the P&L. Total on the calendar.
“A wrong leadership hire reverberates for 18 months. The cost is the mis-hire, not the search.”
What did it actually cost?
Enter your actual numbers: the salary paid, how many months it continued, how productive they actually were, and what the replacement cost. No industry multipliers - your own math, laid out honestly.
This calculator uses only the numbers you enter - no industry multipliers, no invented benchmarks. The result is your own math, laid out honestly.
Based on your inputs
Enter a salary and the months in seat, and your numbers appear here. Nothing is stored - this runs entirely in your browser.
The number tells you what happened. The Diagnostic tells you why.
The mis-hire calculator surfaces the cost. The Hiring Discipline Diagnostic surfaces the system that produced it - 23 questions, ten minutes, a 0-100 score across six weighted dimensions. You will see exactly where your process holds, where it bends, and where it breaks.
Stop calculating the last one. Fix the system that makes the next one.
23 questions. About ten minutes. A scored read of where your hiring breaks.
