Ask a practice Managing Partner what a bad hire costs and they'll usually quote the fee. Occasionally the salary. Rarely the full picture.
The true cost of a poor practice accountancy professional hire is rarely visible on a single line in a management account. It accumulates quietly, across months, in places that are genuinely hard to measure. Understanding it is the first step to avoiding it.
The direct costs everyone knows
The recruitment fee, whether agency or advertising, is the number that tends to dominate the conversation. At practice accountancy professional level, that's typically in the range of £15,000 to £35,000 depending on salary and whether the search was retained or contingency.
Add to that the time invested in the process: Partner time in interviews, HR time in administration, the management bandwidth absorbed in referencing and decision-making. On a conservative estimate, a senior hire process takes 60 to 80 hours of internal time at relatively senior rates.
The costs that don't make it onto the invoice
A practice accountancy professional who underperforms, technically, commercially, or culturally, creates drag that spreads across a practice in ways that can take 12 to 18 months to fully manifest.
Client relationships suffer when quality drops or consistency disappears. In some cases clients leave. At senior levels, even one significant client departure attributable to a hire can represent multiples of the original recruitment cost.
Team performance deteriorates under poor management. Junior staff disengage, output drops, good people leave. The cost of replacing a strong professional who departs because their practice accountancy professional was a poor leader rarely appears on any analysis of the original hiring decision.
Partner bandwidth gets consumed in managing a problem that should have been a solution. Time spent managing underperformance, having difficult conversations, and ultimately exiting someone is time not spent growing the practice.
Why this happens
Most bad senior hires share a common origin: a process that prioritised speed over rigour, or that relied too heavily on a compelling interview rather than a thorough understanding of the candidate's actual track record.
Contingency recruitment, where multiple agencies present candidates speculatively, can exacerbate this. It creates pressure to move quickly, which compresses due diligence. Candidates are presented to multiple firms simultaneously, which reduces the time for either party to make a genuinely informed decision.
The case for a different approach
The practices that hire well at senior level consistently invest more time in the front end of the process, in defining precisely what they need, in understanding the real drivers behind a candidate's interest in a move, and in the quality of due diligence before an offer is made.
That investment looks expensive relative to a quick contingency hire. It is considerably less expensive than the alternative.