Here’s the uncomfortable truth most talent leaders already sense: the headline numbers you see in press releases about the “average cost of a bad hire” are tidy, memorable, and mostly useless for real decisions—especially for early-career roles. The $15,000 to $17,000 claims make for a catchy hook. They don’t help you operate. If we want something that actually moves the needle, we have to ignore the PR and dig into how and where money really leaks when an intern, a new grad, or someone in their first professional role doesn’t work out.

A “bad hire” in this context isn’t a moral judgment. It’s an operational one. An early-career hire becomes “bad” the moment they fail to reach the minimum productivity needed to justify their fully loaded cost within the reasonable ramp window for that role. That’s it. If the ramp never clears the bar, the math never closes, no matter how kind the intent or how high the potential. The earlier someone is in their career, the more of the total value is locked inside time—manager time, mentor time, time spent fixing avoidable errors, time spent recruiting a replacement—so the loss shows up less as a big one-time charge and more as a slow bleed that compounds.

To understand the cost, picture a stack rather than a single line item. You start with acquisition costs: job ads, distribution, recruiter time, interview hours, assessments, travel if you do campus days. For many early-career roles this number looks modest because the media spend per hire is lower than mid-career roles. The trap is that most organizations undercount the time their teams spend interviewing and coordinating, so the true figure hides in calendars rather than invoices. If you’re not logging interviewer hours, you’re already lowballing.

Then comes onboarding and ramp. This is where early-career hiring is fundamentally different. A person fresh out of school or in their first or second role rarely lands at full speed. Some will be productive in a matter of weeks; some take months to learn the systems, policies, and shortcuts that are second nature to your veterans. If the hire exits in month three or four, you’ve burned most of the ramp cost and captured little value in return. That mismatch between spend and payback is why early-career “bad hires” sting more than your averages suggest.

Manager and mentor time is the hidden tax. Every extra check-in, every QA review, every slack thread that turns into a training session is time you’re paying twice: once to the manager who’s coaching, again to the work that manager didn’t do. In healthy teams, this investment is a feature, not a bug; it’s how rookies become pros. But when a hire struggles for weeks, that investment becomes a recurring charge with no compounding interest. Left untracked, it balloons. Set an informal, honest budget for how much extra support a new person should need by week and you’ll quickly spot the exceptions that are driving cost.

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