There's no official figure for what a bad hire costs in hospitality in Spain, but you can work it out yourself. On a conservative estimate, a waiter who doesn't fit and leaves a month after starting costs you between €2,200 and €2,400, and that's counting only the costs you can put a number on.
Then there's what doesn't appear on any invoice, which usually weighs more: service that gets worse, customers who don't come back and the strain on the team covering the gap. Here we go through the sums step by step so you can repeat them with your own numbers, and then look at how to reduce the risk before you hire.
When someone gives you a round number, ask where it comes from. One industry guide puts the cost at between 30% and 150% of annual salary for skilled roles, depending on the responsibility of the job. With a range that wide, what it's really telling you is that everything depends on the role and on which costs you include. IESE's study on staff turnover in restaurants, from 2010, lists those costs (administration, recruitment and the training that goes to waste), although it doesn't put a price on them.
Not everyone who leaves is a bad hire. But every time it is one, you pay a bill like the one we work through below.
Take a waiter on a salary of €24,000 gross a year, which is the lowest figure shown in QIU's waiter room in Madrid. That's €2,000 a month. With the employer's social security contributions, which come to around 30%, that person costs you about €2,600 a month, roughly €16 an hour.
Let's suppose it doesn't work out and they leave after four weeks. These are the items, and you can swap each one for your own figure:
And that's just one month. Spain's Workers' Statute (the Estatuto de los Trabajadores) allows, unless the collective agreement says otherwise, a probation period of up to two months, or three in companies with fewer than 25 employees. The longer you take to recognise the mistake, the higher the bill, and if the person gets through probation and has to be dismissed, it goes higher still.
The most expensive part is the part that can't be measured properly. We haven't found any serious study that puts a figure on it, but any floor manager knows it well.
The table that waits while the dish goes cold and the customer who doesn't complain but doesn't come back either are part of that cost. So is your best waitress, who doubles shifts and fixes someone else's mistakes until one day the vacancy you have to fill is hers. And so are your own hours, the ones you don't spend on the floor because you're looking for staff again.
A CV tells you where someone has worked, but not how they look after a table of twelve when a colleague is missing. Bad hires hardly ever come from reading too few CVs. They come from deciding in a hurry, with nothing more to go on than a piece of paper and a five-minute phone call.
"At Hard Rock we look for people who give off something. Attitude, energy, a real desire to make sure guests have a great time. That doesn't show up on a CV, it shows up when you sit down and talk to someone."
Marta Herrero, HR Director, Hard Rock Hotel Madrid
No interview guarantees you'll get it right, but these five things reduce the risk considerably and work with any job site:
QIU is the first interview portal, and it's built so that you don't have to decide in a hurry and without information. Here you don't choose who to ring on the strength of a piece of paper: the candidates who fit your vacancy book an interview in the slots you've left free, and you talk to each one for about twenty minutes by video before deciding anything. When you finish you receive a summary and a score that help you compare, and the decision is always yours.
Before the interview you see the candidate's Talent Card, which shows measured skills, not just the ones the candidate claims to have, along with ratings from the people who have interviewed them before, their availability and verified right to work. You go into the conversation knowing far more than a CV would tell you.
And talking to candidates doesn't slow you down. 95% of companies have their first interview booked less than 5 minutes after opening a room. ibis Styles Madrid Airport hired in four days without reviewing a single CV, and Hard Rock Hotel Madrid opened one room, spoke to eight candidates and hired in two days.
There's no official figure. In our example, a waiter who leaves a month after starting comes to between €2,200 and €2,400 in direct costs, before counting what you lose in service, in customers and in your team. The most useful thing is to repeat the calculation with your own salaries.
For one departure, add up the lost salary, the recruitment hours, the training hours and the cost of the ad. Then multiply the result by the number of departures you have in a year.
It depends on your collective agreement, so check that first. If it says nothing, the Workers' Statute sets a maximum of two months, or three in companies with fewer than 25 employees.
There's a free account with limits to get you started and a paid version for when you're hiring more often. When you open your first room we'll help you choose.
Add up the hours you put into it, what the ad cost you and that month's lost salary. If it comes to more than you expected, it's worth changing the way you recruit. To talk to candidates before you decide, open your interview room on QIU.
