David runs every Beacon search personally, with uncontrolled reference checks as a standard part of the process.
The U.S. Department of Labor's commonly cited rule of thumb puts the cost of a bad hire at a minimum of 30% of that role's annual salary, and for engineering roles specifically, the real damage usually shows up somewhere the salary number doesn't capture at all.
What actually breaksThe Department of Labor's 30%-of-salary figure is a useful floor, not a ceiling. It captures recruiting cost, onboarding time, and severance, but it doesn't capture what a bad engineering hire actually does to a codebase, a team's morale, or a roadmap's timeline. Those costs are real and usually larger.
Code written by someone who wasn't actually qualified often gets left in production long after they're gone, quietly slowing every future change.
Strong engineers notice when a peer or manager isn't credible. That erosion shows up in engagement and, eventually, in who else decides to leave.
A mis-hire on a critical project doesn't just fail to deliver, they often consume other engineers' time cleaning up or covering for them.
The full search cost repeats, on top of everything already lost, and now with a damaged team to rebuild trust with.
A bad individual-contributor hire is costly. A bad engineering leadership hire is compounding, because they influence every hire that comes after them, every architecture decision the team lives with, and whether your strongest engineers stay or start quietly interviewing elsewhere. This is exactly why we push so hard on uncontrolled references and retention-specific questions in leadership searches, the risk profile is different.
The salary number is the smallest part of what a bad engineering hire actually costs you. The real damage is what it does to the people around them.
David runs every Beacon search personally, with uncontrolled reference checks as a standard part of the process.
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