nigeria we are quit familiar with stuff like this.
I'll never forget the first time I had to fire someone.
I was a middle manager at a start-up in Minneapolis, ramping up a
graphics, marketing, and writing department. I usually had a keen eye
for talent. I'd interview candidates by asking a few softball
questions and then slowly working my way up to more technical queries.
One interviewee (let's call her Sue) seemed ultra professional. She
had a good track record at a previous company working as a Photoshop
expert and designing flyers and brochure. Her portfolio screamed
"talented artist" and she had a direct, no-frills approach. I ended up
hiring her on the spot, a gut reaction.
Then the trouble started.
As anyone in management can tell you, you normally find out an
employee is going to fail on the job from everyone around you first.
"Sue just doesn't understand what we do," they told me at the time.
"She knows Photoshop but she can't seem to learn any of the other
programs."
Where I Went Wrong
Of course, I went through all of the typical steps in the dismissal
process, but our final discussion proved incredibly painful--for both
of us. I liked Sue, but the cost of hiring, training, and replacing
her was quite high. Unfortunately, she just couldn't do the job. She
stormed out of our last meeting with a red face and a rather unkind
gesture.
Looking back, I realized part of the issue was that I was not great at
"onboarding" people--a process that starts long before someone fills
out a W9. (For a long time, I thought onboarding consisted entirely of
filling out paperwork. Oops. It's worth noting that I was only a young
pup myself in business at the time.) Today, a more data-driven
approach can help a start-up avoid some of the costs of making such a
big mistake.
Real Cost of a Bad Hire
According to a blog post by a well-known recruiter named Jorgen
Sundberg, the real cost of onboarding is $240,000 per employee. That's
some serious sticker shock. Sundberg now runs Link Humans, a content
marketing company.
He notes that the total cost of recruiting the wrong employee includes
hiring, total compensation, eventual severance pay, and other factors
like legal fees and totals more like $840,000 when you factor in all
of these costs. (This is based on hiring a mid-level manager who works
2.5 years and is then terminated and replaced.)
In other words, how you hire couldn't be more important. And it's not
just your task.
"Recruiting isn't just a function of recruiters, it also includes
hiring managers and often times, their teams" says Jeff Freeland, the
CEO of the Santa Clara, California-based recruiting start-up
Jobularity.
"This cost is often hard to measure or is missed," he says. "How much
does it cost for, say, a network security manager to set aside a four
hour window for him and three members of his team in order to conduct
interviews?"
Freeland says it might be 16 hours in aggregate for those team
members. Worse, the costs for recruiting tools are going up. He says
LinkedIn Recruiter, for example, can cost well over $10,000.
"Small business just doesn't have enough time, energy, or resources to
react quickly enough to the demands of their customers. As a result,
quick decisions are made on critical hires, which results in the poor
fit," he says.
Indeed, in another infographicby Mindflashrelated to bad hires, 38
percent of small businesses say they hired someone because they needed
to fill the position quickly.
Is there a better way? I like the Jobularity approach and wish there
had been something like this back when I was a hiring manager.
Freeland told me the idea is to create a holistic view of a candidate
using video introductions, profiles of their interests and talents,
and--most importantly--a ranking system that is more data driven than
most recruiting tools.
Could more data have prevented that terrible day when I had to fire an
under-performing employee--and maybe prevented hiring her in the first
place? I'd like to think so. Jobularity is still in beta though, and
so the company doesn't yet have much data on its own success in
matching candidates to jobs.
So what are your horror stories? Do you hire on gut feelings, or a
different approach? Post in comments!
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