Hiring: Mr Right? or Mr Right for now?
yes, I agree. Gendered language is a dangerous decision. But the metaphor doesn’t work without it. And Ms Right/Ms Right now has a much seedier vibe…
What we they/we thinking?
You know the person. Someone who is just wrong - wrong skills, wrong attitude, just wrong, just a round peg in a square hole. This isn’t blaming them (although often they deserve some of it), but recognizing this is not a workable relationship. Sometimes a relationship, whether work, friendship, familial or romantic, just isn’t working for either party. But it always begs the question- how did we get here? How was it before and what went wrong?
There are no right answers below, only a lot of questions. But these are important questions, because you will make bad hiring decisions- it will happen. These are just good questions for your self-reflection.
At some stage someone chose to offer them the job
Were you wrong that they were Mr Right?
This the core question; at some stage someone said- that person, hire them, pick them. The question is whether this was a terrible estimation? I discuss this elsewhere, but to quickly summarise- recruitment is estimation, an educated guess. There are no perfect tools for assessing, only means to provide as accurate a gamble as possible. The question to ask here is; was your estimation wrong? Did you think they were going to be perfect but completely mis-estimated?
Did you miss some signs?
There are two reasons you may have missed information when approximating the likelihood of their success. First, you didn’t gather enough information, or the right information. This could be an over-reliance on some selection tools, or lack of utilisation of others. To give a common example- plenty of people can fake good interviews, but there were plenty of warning signs in their references.
Alternatively you may not have sufficiently weighted the negatives you find. This is surprising hard to avoid- the human brain is prone to a number of cognitive biases here, look up the Halo effect and confirmation bias as applicable examples.
Did you take a gamble that didn’t pay off?
Alternatively, you knew the risk you were taking. The signs were there, and you saw them. You may have weighted to them, but decided to take a risk. If so, don’t beat yourself up; everything is a risk to some extent. Don’t worry about the risk you knew you were taking, just the risks you didn’t know you were taking.
If you going to analyze these decisions, I would recommend considering whether you over-estimated your capacity to do a better job than the last employer or manager. A good example of this is the disgruntled interviewee; the one who complains about their last workplace, begging the question- if they are so disgruntled there, will they be disgruntled here? Maybe, and maybe you take the gamble that you’re better employer than their last one, which may prove to be an over-estimation of you, and under-estimation of the last workplace.
Or: were they Mr Right now?
Some employees were bad hires. Some employees weren’t the right person, but the best we could find from the applicants we had. Sometimes we know they aren’t, or are unlikely to be a good hire, but they are best candidate. The core question here is similar to above- was this a correctly appraised estimation of potential success, or an inaccurate?
Could we wait?
The biggest driver for taking a risk is that we can’t afford to wait for the perfect candidate. When I’m recruiting and struggling to find the perfect candidate, I do occasionally have to point out to the hiring manager that I can’t ‘make’ people, we can only find people who do, or do not exist. The counter to that is taking your time, surveying all of your options, and picking the best, sometimes we settle too early, some we wait too long for the best option to come along.
Alternatively, maybe you didn’t look hard enough. Did you just run a standard process; job ad, screen candidates, interview three, hire one. Maybe this wasn’t the best option, maybe there were the best, but that doesn’t mean they were good enough.
Hindsight is both 20/20, but also imperfect. We tend to look back at decisions only at the negatives that did occur, and ignore the negatives we thought might have occurred, and if fact could have occurred. There is no answer to this, other than to remember, that if we just needed someone to do the job to keep the customer, don’t forget that you kept the customer.
The relationship went toxic
Finally, maybe it wasn’t a bad hire. Maybe they were fine, or could have been hire. Maybe it was their induction, their training, their first impressions, or subsequent issues in the business that made them fall out of love with the business. This happens. The question here is; were they fine for a period of time? How long was that time? Because if for a good period of time they were performing employee, then it’s not a recruitment gap, but a management and engagement gap.
