Always Hire Top Talent, Even If it Costs You More

I know a potential employee that was recently not considered for a position because the prospective employer would not negotiate his base salary.  Employer’s response was, “Money is an issue.”  The base salary offered was $100,000 a year.  The difference in the base salary they were negotiating over was ten to twenty thousand dollars a year. However, the company was stuck on a certain amount and would not budge.

Here are some questions the company should be asking themselves.
How do we place a dollar value on this potential employee’s worth? 
How much value would a change in my talent pool bring to my organization?

The company in question needed to hire someone that could help them expand their offering of products and services.  With this in mind, the employee that they were interviewing was perfect for the job.  He had all of the experience that was necessary to help them negotiate existing contracts with vendors and drive the development and implementation of new product and services. 

Consider this, if the new employee could increase your company’s gross revenue by $1,500,000 to $2,000,000 a year with a minimal or no increase in operating expenses, is he/she not worth another ten to twenty thousand dollars a year?

In addition to being able to fill the position requirements, he was also a seasoned senior executive with unsurpassed expertise in retail sales, services, vast multi-site location expertise, new product and service implementation, training, marketing and merchandising, strategic planning, financial oversight, organizational development, and operations.

He was also willing to relocate and travel up to 75% of the time.

This employee had the ability to impact the company’s sales and add value to the company’s net worth.  If the company would not budge on base salary, shouldn’t they have looked at other options?  Performance bonus?  Stock options?   Six month performance review instead of a year? The company lost an extraordinarily talented executive and will probably end up with a marginal employee.

What do you think?