No claims director would commit to settlement targets without checking handler capacity. No contact centre would promise service levels without counting its agents. Yet hiring plans get approved every year without anyone checking the recruitment team can deliver them. Here's the maths most plans skip — and how to work out the team size you actually need.

The £132,000 bad hire figure gets cited a lot. But it only accounts for one person - the one who got the job. What about everyone else in the pipeline? For scaling businesses hiring at pace without a proper system, candidate experience is the employer brand problem that never arrives as an invoice. It just makes the next hire a little harder, and the one after that harder still. This article looks at where the damage actually goes, why it gets worse during a growth phase, and what fixing it looks like in practice.