Employment 101: Hiring The Right Person The First Time
Posted on Mon, Mar 21, 2011 @ 12:04 PM
In a growing economy, hiring the right person the first time is more important than ever before. Hiring the wrong person is a little more complicated than it sounds. Usually, we can sort the extreme misfits early in the hiring process. The real problem is not with hiring somebody who's a basket case. The real question is what to do with the person who's just not bad enough to get fired. People who are marginally qualified for the job will cause others to pick up the slack caused by their poor performance. Often it has to do with how they do the job and not their ability to do the job. So, the marginally qualified new hire can have a dramatic effect on your organization's productivity and hurt your company culture. This is the person that must be replaced.
It's hard to terminate people. We get to know about them and their family. We eat lunch with them and often welcome them into our business family. But, at the end of the day, our responsibility is to do the right thing for our business and the other members of our business family. No one wins if financial trauma is the consequence of keeping the marginal employees on the team. Hiring the wrong person for the job is an accident - keeping them around for too long is a mistake.
