The true cost of a bad hire and why Food Manufacturers are struggling to hire middle-management roles

Somebody has already done the maths

The Recruitment & Employment Confederation put a figure on this in its Perfect Match research. A poor hire at middle-management level on a salary of £42,000 worked out at £132,015 loss by the time everything was added together – salary, training, recruitment costs, the drop in output across the department and the cost of running the whole process again. That's more than three times what you were paying the person you hired.

The same research found that 85% of HR decision-makers had worked somewhere that made a bad hire, and that a third of them believed those mistakes had cost the business nothing at all. Which tells you how well most organisations track this.

Then work out what it did to the line

The REC's number is a general one, and for food manufacturing it's arguably conservative, because it doesn't capture the part that costs you most. A weak manager in an office costs you productivity. A weak manager on a production line costs you output, and output has a price per hour you already know.

Take the contribution value of the line for one hour. Multiply it by the additional downtime you carried over those six months – the slower changeovers, the breakdowns that took longer to escalate, the late starts because the shift handover wasn't tight. Then add the rework, the waste, and any short deliveries that put you in a difficult conversation with a retailer. Whatever that comes to, it lands on top of the six figures above, and for most sites it dwarfs the recruitment fee that started the whole thing.

And then there's the team underneath

The part that costs most is the hardest to invoice. A manager who can't lead a shift will lose you the people who could have. Your best line leaders are the most employable people on site, and they're the first to go when the shift stops working properly.

Replace three of them with agency cover and you've added cost, lost the corporate memory of how your lines actually behave, and put more pressure on the manager who was already struggling. That's how one poor appointment turns into an eighteen-month problem.

So why is this layer so hard to fill?

Food and drink manufacturing has been recruiting against the odds for years. The Food and Drink Federation's State of Industry report for Q2 2026 puts the sector's vacancy rate at 4.3%, against 2.0% across manufacturing as a whole and 2.2% for the UK. That gap has been there for the best part of a decade.

It's also happening while the workforce shrinks. The sector employed 15,000 fewer people in the first quarter of 2026 than it did a year earlier, a fall of 3.1%, compared with 0.3% across the UK. Fewer people are carrying the same volume, and the middle layer feels that first.

Pay compression is the reason candidates give most often. Since 2016, the minimum wage has risen by a cumulative 76.5%, while average UK earnings have gone up 50.5%. That squeeze has narrowed the gap between what you pay an operator and what you pay the person supervising them. An experienced operator on nights with overtime and a shift premium can take home close to a salaried Shift Manager, and can go home at the end of it without carrying the site. Ask someone to take on responsibility for people, safety and output for a few hundred pounds a month more and a lot of good candidates will politely decline.

Hours are the second reason. The middle layer carries the shifts nobody else wants. Nights, weekends, the Christmas peak, the call at four in the morning when a line goes down. Candidates in their thirties with young families weigh that up carefully, and plenty choose logistics or warehousing instead, where the pay is comparable and the compliance risk is lower.

There's a pipeline problem underneath all of it. A lot of sites used to promote from within and train people properly as they went. That's become harder to fund: the FDF's Q2 2026 survey found 65% of manufacturers expect their skills and training spend to stay flat over the next twelve months, with only 13% planning to increase it. So you now have a generation of technically capable operators and supervisors who've never been taught how to run a shift, hold a difficult conversation or read a KPI pack.

Geography finishes the job. Manufacturing sites tend to be out of town, and the candidate pool within a sensible commute of yours is smaller than you'd like. Relocation for a middle-management salary is a hard sell.

What actually reduces the risk

Write the brief around the site as it is, not the site as you'd like it to be. If the line is old, the team is tired and the last manager left under a cloud, say so. Candidates who take the job knowing all that are the ones who stay.

Then move faster. The strongest candidates in food and drink are usually in a process with someone else within a fortnight. A four-stage interview process spread over six weeks will lose you the person you wanted.

Benchmark the package against what operators on your own site are earning with overtime, not just against what other sites pay their managers. Given how those two numbers have converged since 2016, that comparison matters more than it used to. If the step up doesn't pay, it won't attract.

And when the seat is already empty, put interim cover in while you search properly. Panic hiring is how most bad appointments get made. An empty chair for a fortnight costs you far less than the wrong person in it for a year.

Let's look at your middle layer

We recruit across the board, including but not limited to Production Managers, Technical Managers, NPD Managers, Supply Chain Managers and Engineering Managers into food and drink manufacturing sites across the UK, and it's the only sector we work in. If you've got a role that keeps coming back to market, we'll tell you what's putting candidates off before you advertise it again and work with you to put a good hiring plan in place.

Call the team on 0161 399 1575 or email info@truenorthtalent.co.uk, and we'll help you get the appointment right first time.

Sources

Recruitment & Employment Confederation, Perfect Match: Making the right hire and the cost of getting it wrong – rec.uk.com

Food and Drink Federation, State of Industry Report Q2 2026 – fdf.org.uk