November 11, 2014: The Critical Decision to Offer Employment

This is part 1 of a 7-part series on the hiring process.

As a manager, there are few decisions that impact your team's performance more than who you choose to put on your team.  Ponder that for a moment: every single thing your team accomplishes is dependent on someone (you or another manager) deciding to offer employment to those team members.

The ramifications of the decision are enormous: remember that problem employee, who was just competent enough to not get fired?  Or the employee who did the work of 2 of her peers with better quality?  Or the employee that was late just often enough that you had to choose whether to follow policy or let it ride, and either way was painful?  Whether a good decision or a bad one, the decision to offer someone employment is nearly impossible to rescind until it's too late.

What are the bad consequences of a poor hiring decision?  Let's assume that you made a reasonable mistake, not a disastrous one.  You're more competent than to make a disastrous hiring decision, aren't you?  Of course you are.  Your new employee fits the job description - he is qualified for the job with requisite experience and education.  You find that he never hears something right the first time.  At first, you put it down to you and he adjusting your communication styles, and maybe they don't match.  Then you hear from a team member that she is having the same issue with him.  Okay, you think, he's not a good communicator.  Then he finishes his training process, and you task him with something solo.  Something simple and important, to build his confidence.  He messes it up, and someone else has to fix it after bringing you in to assist.

The employee is earnest and apologetic.   He wants to get better.  You can envision this scenario, no?  I have seen in personally.  I realized about 2 months after hiring an employee that I had made a mistake.  He did not have the seriousness about the work that he needed, and his actions, while not egregious, were not acceptable, either.  My company required documentation, a performance improvement plan, and a period of time for the employee to fix his poor work habits.  3 months later, we finished the process and terminated the employee.

In the mean time, my company had paid him nearly 6 months in pay for his training and early work effort.  My team had paid the opportunity cost of not being able to train someone competent (senior staff members were wasting their time training the new employee instead of training someone who would stay).  I assigned him to work short-term with a closely aligned team, and they were unable to trust him to complete tasks correctly, so it cost them time to fix his mistakes or to do the work of the extra guy on the team who wouldn't pull his own weight.  Cost to the company?  Close to $100,000 when you include travel costs, pay, benefits, and time that senior people spent to train him.

A good hiring decision, however, shows up very quickly.  Good new employees ask questions, provide innovative solutions to nagging problems, and look for ways to contribute.  They do consistent, good work.  They make everyone around them perform better as well.

Training on making hiring decisions is hard to come by.  Good training on the topic may not exist.  I have never seen any.  So how does a person learn how to make this critical decision well?  The hiring manager (or the new employee's immediate supervisor) has to consider 5 things:

1. Qualifications/education
2. Skills
3. Experience
4. Attitude
5. Fit  

We'll discuss each of these in the next few posts.