What A Bad Hire Actually Costs Your Business
This scene plays out too many times. A business rushes to fill a role, brings someone on who seemed fine in the interview, and six months later they’re starting the whole process over. The cost is always more than people expect. It’s not just the salary. It’s everything around it. The Direct Cost of a Bad Hire Start with what you can count. Job posting fees, background checks, onboarding paperwork. Then the salary and benefits you paid for however many months they lasted. If it was a sales role with a ramp-up period, you were paying full salary for someone who wasn’t generating revenue yet. The Department of Labor puts the average cost of a bad hire at about 30% of that person’s annual salary. For a rep making $60,000, that’s $18,000. And that’s just the number you can put on paper. What You Can’t Count While your bad hire was in the seat, deals were slipping through the cracks. Prospects who should have been closed got weak pitches and went elsewhere. Existing customers may have gotten a worse experience. Your other reps were picking up slack, which took them away from their own pipeline. Then there’s your time as a manager. The coaching sessions that didn’t lead anywhere. The difficult conversations. The documentation. The decision to let them go. All of that time came from somewhere, and it usually comes from the parts of the business that needed your attention most. Starting Over Now you’re posting the job again, screening applicants again, doing interviews again. But it’s worse the second time because your pipeline already took a hit, your team is tired, and the seat has been empty or badly filled for months. Most roles take 60 to 90 days to fill the second time around. That’s another full quarter of lost production added to what you already lost. Your Team is Watching This is the part we don’t think enough business owners consider. Your team watched the whole thing happen. They saw someone get hired, struggle, and either leave or get let go. If it happens once, nobody thinks much of it. If it happens again, your good people start to question things. And once your best performers lose confidence in the hiring process, they start looking elsewhere. Losing the people you want to keep is a much bigger problem than losing the one who didn’t work out. How To Avoid It The answer is not complicated. Don’t settle because the seat has been open too long and you feel pressure to fill it. If you don’t have the bandwidth to run a thorough search, that’s what we do. We find candidates who fit the role and the company, and we take the time to get it right the first time. Reach out to us before your next hire becomes your next mistake.
America’s Next Top Talent
You already know this one. Between the training, the ramp-up time, and the eventual turnover, one wrong hire can cost you months. We’ve seen it happen to clients who tried to fill roles on their own and ended up back at square one. At SalesBountyHunter, we find people who actually fit. Whether you’re hiring now or thinking about it for later, we can help. Our Process We don’t rely on one method. Depending on the role, we’ll pull from our network, screen candidates ourselves, or go hunt someone down. Every search looks a little different, and that’s the point. Our Network We’ve built up a bench of candidates across administrative, sales, IT, marketing, management, and executive roles. People come back to us, and they send their friends. That’s probably the best sign we’re doing this right. Screening We’ve spent years on the hiring side of the table, across all kinds of positions. That experience means we know what a strong candidate looks like before they walk into your office. We’ll run job posts, dig through LinkedIn, or pick up the phone and call someone directly — whatever it takes to get you the right person. Headhunting Some roles can’t be filled by posting on a job board. Executive, C-Suite, and attorney positions usually require going after people who aren’t looking. They’re hard to find and your requirements are specific. That’s the bounty hunting part of our name. The Slogan You Eat What We Kill. We started as a sales consulting firm, and the slogan stuck. It means we’re paid on results. We don’t get comfortable and we don’t coast. When you hand us a role to fill, we treat it like it’s our own business on the line. Let’s Talk If you’ve been burned by bad hires or you’re staring at an open role that won’t fill itself, get in touch. You can also browse our current openings to see what we’re working on right now. If you’re on the other side of the table and looking for work, head over to Find Your Dream Job.
How Salespeople Handle Rejection
If you’ve been in sales long enough, you’ve felt it. The prospect who ghosts you. The deal that was a sure thing until it wasn’t. Any decent sales process has to include what we call a dose of mental shampoo — rinse out the negativity, condition your soul with a positive mindset, and get back on the phone. How It Looks Sometimes the customer just doesn’t pick up. That’s rejection by omission. Other times you do everything right and still need three more calls to get a “yes.” And sometimes, even after the yes, the deal falls apart. People will agree to things on a call just to hang up. We like to say yes is the hardest objection to overcome — but that’s a topic for another day. Accepting that rejection is real is one thing. Knowing what to do about it is something else entirely. Dealing With It There’s no trick that makes rejection stop hurting. But there are ways to keep it from knocking you off course. Have a system Good salespeople don’t just white-knuckle through a bad stretch. They have a reset process. Ours is simple: “Some will, Some won’t, So what, next!” Say it out loud if you have to. It works because it keeps you moving instead of sitting there replaying a lost deal in your head. Take a breath Losing a big one hurts. Give yourself a minute to absorb it. But don’t let that minute turn into an hour. The longer you sit with it, the harder it is to pick the phone back up. Momentum is everything in this line of work. Perspective Honestly, if every pitch turned into a deal, it would get boring fast. It’s the losing that makes the wins feel like something. Disappointment comes and goes, but the people who last in this business are the ones who get back on the horse every single time. Move on Next time a phone slams down or a deal goes sideways, shake it off. Move on to the next one. That’s the whole secret, and every salesperson worth their paycheck already knows it. If you’re in sales and the grind is getting to you, or you’re looking for a better fit somewhere else, we can help with that too. Check out Find Your Dream Job or just give us a call. We also wrote about sales movies if you want something lighter.
What Sales Movies Get Right (And Mostly Wrong)
There are some great films about salespeople out there. There’s just one problem. Almost all of them are about criminals. Spoiler alert. The Bad Ones Hollywood can’t seem to tell a sales story without somebody committing a felony. Here are the biggest offenders. Glengarry Glen Ross Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin. This cast alone is worth the ticket. You get a classic late-night sales meeting, the best “go to lunch” moment in movie history, and a great scene where a salesman finally tells off his manager. But the actual plot? A sales team so beaten down and desperate that somebody breaks into the office and steals the leads. Fun to watch. Not a management playbook. Wolf of Wall Street The Jordan Belfort story. “Sell me this pen.” Sure, there’s some great phone work in here, and some of the sales scenes are genuinely electric. But the guy was making jerk-off motions at his clients while taking their money, and that’s before you get to the fraud. Don’t be like this. Boiler Room Giovanni Ribisi shuts down his illegal basement casino to go sell fake stocks. The best scene is when a newspaper telemarketer cold-calls him, and he coaches the guy into actually making a pitch. Doesn’t work though — Giovanni reads the Times. Good lesson in rejection. Sometimes you lose even when you say the right things. It ends badly for everyone in the boiler room. Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller wrote it. Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich performed it on film. A man who spent his whole life valuing sales relationships over his real ones, only to realize at the end that he’s worth more dead than alive. He pays off the mortgage — by dying in an insurance fraud scheme. Bleak. The Good One If you want a sales movie that doesn’t end in handcuffs, watch Tommy Boy. Tommy is a good person. He doesn’t cheat. He grinds, he learns from the people around him, he follows up with old customers. He earns every sale the hard way. That’s what real selling looks like. Chris Farley and David Spade at their best. They filmed this during downtime from SNL — a show already famous for having zero downtime. Come for the movie review, stay for the trivia. The Takeaway The movies that get remembered are the scam stories. But the salespeople who last are the ones doing honest work and building actual relationships. That’s always been true and it’s not going to change. If you’re trying to build a sales career the right way, or you need to hire sales talent you can trust, that’s what we do. Talk to us or check the job board.