Direct costs — recruiting fees, onboarding, severance — are the easiest to count and the smallest part of the total. The larger costs are indirect: the hiring manager's time re-running the search, the team's time re-training a replacement, and the productivity gap while a seat sits effectively unowned during a bad hire's slow decline and eventual exit.
A mis-hire at senior level damages more than the org chart. Teams that watch a leader hired with fanfare quietly exit within six months become measurably more skeptical of the next hiring announcement — and that skepticism shows up as slower ramp times and quieter internal referrals for months afterward.
In our own post-mortems on searches that didn't work out, the root cause traces back to the brief stage far more often than the interview stage: a scorecard that was vague enough to let a wrong-fit candidate through, or a must-have that got quietly downgraded to a nice-to-have under time pressure. This is the direct argument for the replacement guarantee we build into every retained and contingent engagement.
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