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> True, but the costs (both direct and ancillary) of making a bad hire are so high that anything we can do avoid making the wrong hire would be worthwhile.

That's a load of highly-enriched equine fertilizer. I have had this discussion here before. I asked for information. I didn't get much. Some worst-case hypotheticals that, to my knowledge, have never happened anywhere. A buttload of management failures surrounding bad hires where management was responsible for the vast majority of the costs, not the hire. A couple legitimate bad hires where the costs were significant, but not in the same ballpark as people like you parrot.

Also ignored in this conversation: what is the cost of keeping your req open? How much money are you losing, directly or indirectly, by not having someone in that role? Why do you think someone can't grow into the role?




I actually agree that the biggest cost of a bad employee is a management failure to either create an environment that the employee can thrive or is too "nice" to confront reality and get rid of them quickly. I can't speak to your experiences and I never said bad hires were costly due to the employee vs. Management screwups. The simple reality is that every day a bad hire is in place, is a day that a much more productive employee is not in place, which costs could be astronomical.

The bottom line is that "slow to hire and fast to fire" as difficult as it is, is very sound advice!

Without knowing you and jumping to a conclusion based on your comment, I assume you don't appreciate that employee boss relationships are adversarial by nature and there is often considerations management makes that might seem bad but are really a product of their understanding of whats possible and realistic within limiting circumstances...

I used to complain with my friends about all the things we would change in our boss and the company we worked for and now after many years I realize that at the time I had no flipping clue about anything.




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