A survey of over 160 hiring leaders across Germany, Austria and Switzerland just put a number on something most of us already feel in our gut: a bad hire is expensive. Not expensive in a vague, hand-wavy way. €28,706 expensive, on average. Some companies reported figures north of €100,000.
The survey was run by Thryve Talent, and I want to walk through what's actually driving that number, because the reasons aren't the ones most hiring processes are built to catch.
What a Bad Hire Actually Costs
A few numbers from the survey stood out to me:
of companies reported costs of €20,000 or more per bad hire.
of hiring managers said they'd made a bad hire in the past 12 months.
admitted they kept that hire on for too long after knowing it wasn't working.
30% of bad hires left within 3 to 6 months. 11% stayed over a year.
That last 11% is the expensive group: bad hires kept on for over a year, some costing upward of €77,000 before the company finally acted.
It is a Skills Problem. But it also isn't.
Nearly a third of the bad hires in the survey came down to poor culture or team fit, not a lack of technical skill. Expectation mismatches and thin soft skills made up most of the rest.
That tracks with what we see running technical interviews for engineering teams: candidates clear the technical bar constantly. What trips teams up is everything the CV and the coding round don't test for, whether this person actually works well with the team they're joining.
The Hiring Process Itself Is Often the Problem
Thryve Talent and AssessDev agree on that. 40% of hiring managers in the survey said their current hiring process isn't working, and longer, messier timelines correlated with worse outcomes, not better ones.
That's the part worth sitting with. Dragging a process out doesn't make a team more careful. Usually it means candidates are being evaluated on inconsistent criteria: a different interviewer, a different set of questions, a different bar, project by project. Two candidates for the same role rarely get asked the same thing, so "we compared them fairly" is more feeling than fact.
What Actually Prevents It
Let's fix hiring then. Most teams are solving the wrong problem. The fix isn't more interviews. It's more consistent ones.
- Define what success looks like for the role beyond the tech stack, before the first interview goes on the calendar.
- Assess culture and team fit early, not as a final gut-check after the offer's basically already decided.
- Ask every candidate for a role the same core technical question, scored against the same rubric, so you're comparing answers instead of impressions.
- If your team doesn't have the bandwidth to run that process consistently on every req, that's exactly what interview-as-a-service exists for.
Build a Hiring Process That Catches This Before the Offer
Inside How to Interview Engineers Without Being an Engineer, we teach the exact rubrics and questions that keep technical interviews consistent, no engineering background required. Or book an interviewer and we'll run the process for you.
