According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, 67 percent of companies acknowledge that a bad hire adversely affected their business in the last year. Twenty-four percent of hiring managers said a single bad hire cost their business more than $50,000 in the last year. Four-in-ten said a bad hire cost them more than $25,000. Lost sales, negative effects on client relations and lower productivity were among the factors contributing to the financial damage.

Of employers who made a bad hire, 36 percent said they think they made a mistake hiring someone because they needed to fill the job quickly, followed by lack of understanding of where their target talent is (20 percent) and unsuccessful sourcing techniques (9 percent).

Hiring the right folks is becoming increasingly important as hiring costs increase. Fifty-eight percent of employers have an average cost per hire of more than $1,000, up from 29 percent in 2008, according to the survey. It's even costlier for specialized areas that are experiencing a shortage of qualified talent. Eighty percent of IT employers said it costs them in excess of $1,000 to fill an open position. Those costs will likely rise even more if, as fellow IT Business Edge blogger Susan Hall wrote last week, still-sluggish IT hiring begins to pick up.