Four Ways a Bad IT Staff Hire Can Cost You
When it comes to hiring a member of your IT staff, it’s critical to get it right. They have the ability to impact so many aspects of your team’s overall performance and operations.
Having the right team in place for your IT support can save you both time and money. But what happens when you hire the wrong person? A bad hire can have a damaging effect on your overall organization in ways that significantly hinder your bottom line. One study examined the cascading effects of a bad hire and found the following:
- 75% of managers surveyed reported having made a bad hire
- 64% say the negative impact of a bad hire was even worse a year after making the initial hire
When it comes to executing IT services, you don’t want to get stuck hiring the wrong person for the job because it can cost you in both the short term and long term. The Department of Labor estimates that hiring an employee roughly costs around a third of their salary – meaning that when hiring managers hire the wrong person, you’re out a significant amount of money with nothing to show for it but poor performance and the hope that you can get it right the second time around.
Let’s take a closer look at four ways a bad IT hire can cost you big time and how you can combat those issues their hiring causes by partnering with a professional IT staffing agency.
It may lead to poor service that costs you with your clients
When it comes to IT support, results matter. Having an effective information technology staff in place with the right skill set can be the difference between IT disruptions acting as momentary blips or being disasters that shutter your operations for days or weeks at a time.
Imagine you have a service outage while working on a critical project. Your IT team will need to be ready to handle an influx of service requests from your other team members while providing fast, effective solutions.
If you hire the wrong person, they may not be able to keep up with this breakneck pace. Worse yet, they may insist on quick fixes that don’t address the root cause of the problem. As this is more reflective of a pattern of behavior and problem solving, they are likely to make the same mistakes over and over again.
If someone you hire for an IT position does poor work, it has the ability to severely impact your entire organization’s ability to execute their roles. If they work inefficiently, it can cost your other staff members time as they wait on responses to their queries. A new hire is always a bit of a gamble, but putting your human resources department or employing staffing firms to assist in the recruiting process can minimize the guesswork.
One advantage of partnering with an IT staffing firm is that you’re outsourcing your IT tasks to proven experts you won’t have to supervise or account for. You won’t have to worry about making a bad hiring decision, because the staffing firm handles nothing but IT team members. They’re experts in identifying well-qualified, high-performing IT staff. They have a better idea of what good employees to look for, increasing the likelihood that you’ll get results out of your IT support. Overall, staffing agencies that specialize in IT services know what specific skills and patterns to look for, so these errors are less likely to occur.
It increases management’s workload
Ultimately, a bad hire reports to someone who is responsible for their productivity and output. While during the onboarding process they may be reporting to a hiring manager, once the real work begins, it may very well be another IT person or a more senior-level supervisor they need to answer to.
When a bad hire fails to do their job effectively, it puts the onus on management to address the problems the bad hire is unable to solve. This leader may or may not have the necessary skills to do so, compounding the problem if they don’t have an IT background. Bad hires may just need guidance or constructive criticism to get to where they need to be in their role, but if their project manager or supervisor does not have an IT background themselves, they may have a hard time determining what skill set they need to improve to perform effectively.
Even if the bad hire’s manager does have IT experience, handling their direct report’s workload just increases the amount of stress they’ll deal with as part of their day-to-day responsibilities. A manager already has enough on their plate as it is – having to pick up an underperforming employee’s slack only creates more headaches that could then impact their job performance, costing the company employee morale.
When you work with an IT staffing company, you’re no longer responsible for the workload. The staffing agency already has an established chain of command to ensure all tasks are completed per your original agreement with the vendor. They manage not only the hiring process, onboarding process, and search for red flags in their candidates, but also the performance of the new hire, ensuring that your company did indeed get the hire that they were promised.
If you have to replace them, you’ll need to spend time finding their replacement
One of the biggest problems associated with bad hires is that eventually, they need to be replaced with a new hire. As we’ve said before, recruiting and hiring new employees comes at high costs.
How much you spend to hire a new employee will vary depending on your needs and industry, but low-end estimates put it at $3,500 for replacing a sub-minimum wage employee. Your recruiter will need to identify a new candidate, nurture a relationship, and you’ll have to conduct the interview process before human resources performs background checks and completes the hiring process.
That effort and cost adds up fast. When you make a bad hire, not only are you wasting the investment of time and resources on the person you just hired, but you’re also committing to investing time and resources into hiring someone else as well.
After you’ve replaced them, you’ll need to spend time training their replacement
Once you’ve gone through the lengthy process of identifying new talent for your original bad hire, you then have to train their replacement. Even if you nail it on the second attempt with an all-star candidate, they’ll still require a period of time to get to know your organization and the job requirements before they are fully functional. At the end of the day, your time and costs have doubled in order to get the right person for the job.
Just like the hiring process, this training takes time and money. You’ll have to get your new IT staff member the proper credentials, brief them on the IT systems your organization uses, and get them situated with equipment.
One report estimated it costs around $1,200 to train a new employee – this number could be bigger depending on the level of training needed. There are also hidden costs associated with training new employees, like the time their mentor or supervisor spends working with them, instructional materials, and additional equipment they may need.
The recruiting and training costs can be avoided when you have the right IT team in place and avoid having to hire anyone directly at all. Partnering with the right IT staffing firm allows you to focus solely on providing the business solutions you’re qualified to provide. You won’t have to spend valuable time and resources hiring people because you have your own extension of your team in the form of an IT staffing firm.