Cost of Bad Hires

It's more expensive to make a bad hire than to not hire someone and move a bit slower.

Would this not select for firing your best workers (who aren't worried about finding another job)?

Figuring out which employees are bad enough that they should be let go is quite costly, as is the resulting churn. You'd rather not hire those people in the first place, but once you've hired them you may be stuck with them for quite a while. So it can be a legitimate concern.

I've never run a company so this may be naive or uninformed on my part, but I get the impression that hiring and firing people, at least here in California, can be a costly process with regards to unemployment insurance, litigation for wrongful termination, etc. Again, I may be overestimating this burden on businesses so please correct me if I'm wrong.One thing I've noticed over the years is that despite how good your interview/hiring process may be, you always end up with

The rationale is that a bad hire is very expensive. Not just salary, but emotional and temporal investment. Let's say you need to hire a salesperson and hire the wrong one. You fire them after two months and now have to context switch into hiring again.For small startups, firings have an effect on the entire company. Absolutely make the right choice and let someone go if you have to, but it still has an amplified cost across the team.I personally take responsibility for the emotional

Hiring many people and firing them shortly after isn't very productive use of human minds. Those people were doing probably something more valuable instead.

You assume that they hired with eventual plan of firing. Thats not the case. They hired because opportunity cost of not hiring was too high.

Hiring someone, having them under-perform due to having multiple jobs, and then firing them is incredibly costly. Having at tighter application process to prevent that and other similar situations is likely worth the loss in candidates.

Its like this for all jobs: the reason is that a bad employee typically subtracts more value than a good employee adds. So companies put a lot of effort in lowering the odds of hiring bad employees even if it means positions remain unfilled.

Yes it sucks. But from the company's perspective not hiring a replacement first is even more risky.