There are two things to consider here: the real costs of a bad hire and why you should always invest in skills.

Let’s start with some statistics. Altogether 41 percent of companies surveyed say that a bad hire can cost at least $25,000 and another 25 percent of businesses say that the same cost can be more than $50,000.

And that’s just money.

We’re not even counting lost worker productivity, the time lost due to recruiting and training another worker, plus the negative impact on clients.

Why do companies hire quickly, and then regret it?

The most pressing need according to a variety of studies is filling the position as soon as possible. Around 38 percent of companies hire based solely on how quickly they need to find somebody. Of companies, 21 percent didn’t even test or research the employee’s skills well enough and 11 percent of firms didn’t perform adequate reference checks.

It can be even worse when hiring software developers

If you decide to hire an in-house developer, you don’t just have to think about the costs associated with a typical recruitment process.

You also need to keep in mind the potential increase in software maintenance and troubleshooting costs. A programmer who writes bad, or bugged code, can easily destroy the whole team’s effort.

Then, you still have to find the bug—and so you need to allocate the time of other developers.

Furthermore, it’s super important to remember that a good programmer can be as effective as 5-10 average programmers. Therefore, you may not need 10 people on your team.

It’s not easy to find good programmers

We could say that we have all the good ones, but that statement would be true for any company out there.

What is true, however, is that we’re doing all we can do to make sure our people stay with us. We offer them a competitive salary, flexible working conditions, any tools they need, projects that (hopefully) they like working on, and more.

Any reasonable software company will do everything in its power to stop its top talent from leaving. Experts in their fields are not born in the thousands—and a techno-centric firm can’t hire only average people.

Developers are not sales people, nor are they customer service specialists

In a technology company, developers are the core. They’re almost everything. They keep the engine running. Developers nowadays are artists, scientists, and architects. Together, they can become the most efficient part of your business, and you should focus on choosing them carefully.

When outsourcing, do it in a smart way

Poland is known as a country with top development talent, and that’s why decided to establish our R&D department there. With both the culture and the work ethic like those in the United States, we found that our collaboration with clients from all around the world is incredibly smooth.

Also, Poland is one of the top countries when it comes to communication skills and knowledge of the English language. Hence…

Communication is essential when working with off-shore developers

You need to make sure that the team you’ll be working with has a transparent, clear process that keeps everyone involved in the loop. Regular video calls for collecting feedback and planning the next iteration, having a proper staging environment, and a day-to-day summary followed by a weekly review—these should be a standard practice everywhere.

It takes blood and sweat to build the right team

Ultimately, it took us six years to be where we are now. We had to part ways with a lot of people, and hire even more of them. We had to test things, try out everything, learn, rinse, and repeat. It wasn’t easy for any of us.