What did your last bad technician hire actually cost you?
Contractors feel a bad hire as a string of separate annoyances: a callback here, a lost customer there, three weeks of a senior tech babysitting someone who did not work out. They rarely add it up. Enter your own numbers and see the total, broken into every line item, with the formula and source behind each one.
That looks outside a typical range for this role. The calculation still runs, but double-check the number.
Most owners guess low here. The industry median tends to run longer than gut instinct suggests.
That looks outside a typical range. The calculation still runs, but double-check the number.
HVAC · Service tech · 1 bad hire this year
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Every line shows its own formula and where the assumption comes from. Nothing here is counted twice: the lost billable revenue line subtracts the wage the line above it has already charged, so the two add up to the full revenue shortfall rather than billing the same dollar in both places.
Recruiting cost $1,500
Contractor-reported average for job ads, screening time, and recruiter fees; editable.
Onboarding & training investment $4,476
Wage-equivalent cost of training time, including the mentoring tech’s diverted hours.
Unproductive wages $5,819
Wage you paid for output you did not get. A bad hire typically performs at 50-70% of expected capacity during this window (The Hiring Academy, 2026).
Lost billable revenue $20,581
Revenue you did not earn, over and above the wage counted above. The two lines are deliberately not double-counted against the same months.
Rework & callbacks $9,900
Uses your stated callback/rework rate for this hire, applied to monthly billable revenue.
Manager & mentor time $3,339
Managers spend an average of 17% of their time managing underperforming employees (Robert Half research).
Cost of re-hiring $3,738
A separate hiring cycle from the first line, not a repeat of it: you pay to recruit twice. SHRM: replacing an employee typically costs 50-200% of annual salary.
Common questions
How is this number calculated?
Seven components (recruiting, onboarding, unproductive wages, lost billable revenue, rework and callbacks, manager and mentor time, and re-hiring cost) are added together and multiplied by how many bad hires you have had in the last 12 months. Every formula and its source is shown on the page.
Does this double-count the same money?
No, and one line is built specifically to avoid it. The revenue you did not earn already contains the wage you were paying while it went uncollected, so the lost billable revenue line subtracts whatever the unproductive wages line has already charged. The two still add up to the full revenue shortfall; they just never bill the same dollar twice. Recruiting appears twice on purpose: once for the hire that did not work out and once for their replacement, which are two separate hiring cycles you actually paid for.
Where do the default numbers come from?
Wages are pulled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2024. Cost multipliers reference published research from SHRM and Robert Half. Every default is editable.
Can I share my result with someone else?
Yes. Your inputs are saved in the page URL, so copying and sharing the link reproduces the exact same result for anyone who opens it.
Does this account for how long the problem took to notice?
Yes. Months before the problem was clear is the input with the most leverage on the total. Most owners underestimate this number; the industry median tends to run longer than gut instinct suggests.
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