Читать книгу Predicting Success - Lahey David - Страница 9

And so the first step to ensuring future success for an organization is to get a grip on the human resources that power it. Managers misunderstand the value of the individuals that populate their company break room at great risk and expense. Research demonstrating the cost of a mismanaged workforce – and the value of a well-managed one – abounds.

Certainly, there are direct costs that can be immediately measured – the most significant of which is an employee's salary and benefits. But it's in the muddy hallways of “indirect” costs that we run into trouble. Think loss of productivity; the expense associated with other staffers' recruitment, hiring, and recovery time; and the often considerable expenses of training a new employee for his assigned post.

The specific figures tracking the outlay of a bad hire for a company run the gamut, but all are sufficiently distressing. Estimates range from $7,000 for replacing a salaried employee, up to more than $53,000 for a staffer earning an annual salary of $40,000. The Society for Human Resource Management has suggested that replacing supervisory, technical, and management personnel can cost a company between 50 percent and several hundred percent of the individual in question's salary. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the average costs of a bad hire may “equal 30 percent of the first year's potential earnings.” According to a report by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley, turnover in management positions often costs 150 percent of the salary of the staffer in question. And another estimate – this one taking into consideration hiring costs, total compensation, the expense of maintaining the employee, disruption costs, severance pay, mistakes, failures, and missed business opportunities – submits that the termination of a second-level manager earning $62,000 a year in a position he's held for two-and-a-half years will deliver a bill to his company worth a whopping $840,000.

And outside of all these calculations is the intangible burden of discomfort with which a bad hire taxes a manager's psyche. Hire a guy who doesn't succeed on the job and endure a unique kind of failure. Sure, the flagging staffer pays the ultimate price in the loss of his employment, but the manager who brought him on board does not escape the experience unscathed. Thanks to such a misstep, the hiring process – and all the hoop jumping it entails – have to be endured all over again. The ad has to be reposted, the candidates have to be rescreened, the interviews have to be reconducted, the forms have to be rewritten, the introductions have to be remade, and the training has to be redone. And so on. Such an uncomfortable ordeal leaves a scar on every last soul who participates in it. An argument can be made that those managers with the better “golden-gut” intuition can do better in the selection process. But how much better? An interview is really only about as good as a coin toss in this game.

Who knew that getting the right fit the first time matters as much as it does? Um. You should have. For most other “asset” purchases, you would have done your research and you most certainly would have “insurance” on them. A data-driven, people-founded asset plan makes business sense and reduces risk for any organization. Most managers do more research on the type of vacation they want to go on than in selecting the team whose labors will enable the time to have that vacation.