This may be the most depressing post I’ve had to write in a while. If you’re not in the mood for that, come back later in the week for something a little more upbeat. Sometimes reality isn’t fun though. Laurie’s post on progressive discipline and its follies reminded me of something I learned very early in my career about hiring, discipline and firing.
I Know How To Hire The Right People
Every manager thinks they can hire well. There is no exception to this rule. They think they can sniff out people and select the best people. Even the absolute worst managers who made the absolute worst decisions think they are still as good as anyone.
I was in this boat too. I celebrated every great hire and conveniently forgot the bad ones. I thought I was on top of the world, I had this thing nailed. Hiring was a cinch. That was true until I started looking at the stats.
I started comparing how employees were performing on the job and I was just a little humbled. When it came down to hiring decisions that I made or had a major hand in, I was doing a very average job. As you can see by my crudely made Microsoft Paint graph, a few of the hires I made performed really well or really bad. Most were average (either a little above or a little below average).
That’s when I started realizing that I had a hard time justifying my ego on this one. We used testing, behavioral questioning and multiple interviewers and still came away doing no better than average. What was I doing wrong?
The answer is complicated but I may have been doing nothing wrong. The problem is we are hiring humans, not robots. All of this talk of hiring process improvements and scientific analysis is fantastic but even elite hiring organizations are still only getting slightly better than average results.
Performance Problems May Not Be Related To A Bad Hire
Laurie suggests you show bad hires the door and give them a check on the way out. Pretty harsh, right? In a performance savvy business environment (is there any other kind these days), people need to show value early in the process. Those that don’t get it, those that don’t perform well… those people don’t usually pan out. Once a person enters a progressive discipline process, they rarely make a turn around. I’ve seen a few of them happen and it usually surprises me.
The problem with firing them Johnny on the spot is that you never get to see how your whole process is working. Many times, going through a progressive discipline process means HR gets more visibility into the training and coaching process. And many times, we are horrified to find out that the employee did initially fit but the supervisor either smothered them with their micromanaging or gave them so little feedback that they didn’t ever know they were screwing up.
As serious as making a bad hire is, having a bad manager in place is much more serious to me. That’s reason enough to keep progressive discipline, corrective action, or whatever you want to call it in place.
So You Hired A Bad Apple. Now What?
Sometimes though, it has nothing to do with a manager. The employee was just a bad hire. One you shouldn’t have made in the first place.
Making it worse for you is that these people are often trying hard, trying to catch on, trying to meet numbers and are probably some of the nicest people in the office. When you have to break the news to them, it will be difficult. You’ll have to tell them that in this job, their best just wasn’t good enough. That’s reality. And it is generally your bad for not recognizing that before they switched around their life to come work for you.
If the cost of rehiring a new person, paying out a severance and the toll it takes on managers who have to deal with it, perhaps you could consider the human cost of a poor hiring decision. Not that being paralyzed about a tough hiring situation is going to make you very successful but it could at least make you think twice about making that decision.
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“Every manager thinks they can hire well. There is no exception to this rule. ”
Maybe you just meant HR managers, but this is one technology manager who knows he struggles with hiring. I’ve improved noticeably over the past few years, but at a high cost. And I’m still nowhere as competent at it as I would wish.
Great post Lance, with lots of good points. I’ve only been in a hiring position once and it was early in my career. I lucked into a couple good hires – they were all interns I’d found and groomed for a couple months before the company hired them so all parties knew what they were getting into and I think things worked out as a result.
But a couple other hires didn’t work out so well and I put a lot of the blame on myself for making hiring decisions too personal, i.e., that I based part of my decision on whether I liked the person as a person, not whether they had the skills or potential to do well.
In my defense I was very young and not a very experienced manager and probably shouldn’t have been put in that position in the first place. My bosses were equally clueless or they wouldn’t have left hiring decisions up to me either. But that didn’t make it any easier to have to fire one of the people I hired when we finally realized things weren’t working out and never would. That was more years ago than I care to admit and it still bothers me.
Michelle Rafter
I once worked with a very nice woman who worked really hard, but just couldn’t understand how to do the job. I tried to train her using a variety of different methods, as did 2 of my co-workers. It started to make me think of the scene in City Slickers when Bruno Kirby exploded because Daniel Stern’s character was never going to understand how to program the VCR.
Our boss refused to let her go because she was so impressed with this woman’s work ethic. Luckily for all of us, she eventually met a nice man and left to be a stay-home mom, the job she had always wanted and seems to be genuinely good at. I know that sometimes it can be hard to find someone who works really hard and when we do we want to give them all the chances we can, but if they can’t do the job, you eventually have to cut your losses. Good post!
@Ethan – You always gotta come around here and poke holes in my arguments, don’t you? In my experience, you are probably the exception rather than the rule.
@Michelle – I think this is one of those things you have to experience to believe. At least, that was the case with me. Not so easy to say you are a top hiring person if your record doesn’t support it.
@Darcy – I’ve been in the exact same situation. It sucked too. I am glad the person found their true calling though.
I was once party to a hire many years ago that turned out horribly. All the warning signs were there in the interview — the inability to understand questions, the inability to answer questions, and the inability to speak good English. Yet, yet, she dressed so well and had the flirty eyes. Our department was 100% male before her arrival and oh how she played us like a supermodel strutting in front of hormonally charged teenagers. Objectivity? Ha…we were too busy being Pepé Le Pew.
Great points on hiring and being human. Where I agree that it is, at best, difficult, to make the hiring process scientific, you can increase the odds of success by 1. profiling the job ahead of time so that you really know what you are looking for, 2. involving more than yourself in the interviewing process (I have found that we get very biased when we begin the process and are often blinded by our initial impressions), 3. doing at least 3 interviews so that you can give the interviewee an opportunity to “loosen up” for it is when this happens that you can see more of the true colors of the person and, 4. carefully structuring the job expectations at the outset with clearly stated measuring tools/meetings to evaluate and communicate progress to the new employee.
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