This won’t be the first list of hiring perils you’ve ever read, but it may be the most complete. The wrong hire doesn’t just cost your organization in a handful of broad areas; the result is a situation comparable to the medical concept of comorbidity.

Comorbidity is the presence of one or more disorders (or diseases) co-occurring with a primary condition that exacerbate and compound it, making it difficult to control and nearly impossible to cure. A bad hire can be like a case of staph infection, exacerbated by acne and psoriasis. Not a pretty picture. Even when the problem is rooted out, a mess remains.

The best prescription for the wrong hire is prevention. With that in mind, here are the 15 costs of making the wrong hire:

1. Initial Hiring Costs—job search, interviewing, reference checks, background and drug screening.
2. Compensation—the employee’s salary, bonuses and benefits.
3. Tangible Resources—the office, cubicle, computer, laptop, workstation, office supplies and any other resources the employee uses.
4. Employee Training—onboarding, company policies, software, processes and professional development to bring the employee up to the qualifications for the position.
5. Additional Management—the excess hours required by superiors to oversee, correct and improve the employee’s work.
6. Additional Peer Hours—the additional hours spent by the peers of an underperforming employee to compensate for or correct poor work.
7. Reduced Employee Morale—the intangible effect of the added work and aggravation that can demoralize those working closest to the employee.
8. Lost Employees—though a bad hire may not directly cause a good employee to leave, the cumulative result of several bad hires can be lost good hires.
9. Disruption Costs—the various costs to your business, including excess training, fixing mistakes and finding a new role for the employee.
10. Client Relationships—in customer-facing roles, the damage done to client relationships, or relationships (and business) lost as a result.
11. Lost Productivity—all of the work that should be performed by this role that isn’t being performed, or is being performed ineptly.
12. Lost Revenue—the lost revenues the position is not generating.
13. Re-hiring Costs—all of the hiring costs, repeated.
14. Severance Pay—severance and/or unemployment, plus extended healthcare coverage.
15. Opportunity Costs—the difference in total impact of the wrong hire and the candidate you missed.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Take your time in the hiring process, check references and, if you can, “audition” candidates. And, of course, partner with a staffing agency like Imprimis with years of experience in your industry. By leveraging our hiring expertise, you can dramatically reduce the number of bad hires—and the many costs they create.