How Many Duds Do You Hire?

While much attention has been given to the importance of hiring talented employees, issues around the cost of bad hires are of increasing importance to both HR professionals and their organizations. What strategies could you use to improve the performance of new hires and how can you reduce the likelihood of their early departure?

With the best screening process and interviewing of candidates, it’s still possible to have a very high on-the-job success rate even if major errors occurred in the screening process. This may sound counter-intuitive, but there is a reason for this.

Tips for minimising new-hire early turnover
For the purposes of this article, the definition of a new hire ‘failure’ includes a new hire that: must be given major training or retraining during the first six months; voluntarily quits within six months; must be redeployed during the first year; is given performance management counselling during the first year; must be terminated within one year, or is a finalist who refuses your job offer.

Involve employees. If you have a less-than-perfect screening process, as we all do, the best way to minimize the impacts of any errors is to ensure that the new hire gets additional help once they start the job. In other words, even if the candidate does not have a perfect set of skills, they can still succeed if other employees want them to succeed and a buddy system is created. If other employees want them to succeed, they will provide the new hire with whatever special help, mentoring and guidance they need.

The best way to ensure your employees are willing to provide this extra help after the candidate starts the job is to involve the employees early on in the hiring process. Involving employees works because if they feel they are responsible for the new hire and that they own the hiring process, employees will invariably find a way to help the new hire succeed on the job. The best ways to increase employee involvement include paying special attention to employee referrals, providing peer-to-peer interviews, and, whenever possible, letting employees make the final selection from the group of finalists you have approved.

Here is a big one....avoid misleading the candidate.... giving them a realistic job preview. A major reason for candidate failure and early turnover is that the candidate was misled about the job, the manager, or the company during the recruiting and interviewing process. It’s important to not only provide the positive attributes of the job, but if you over-glamourize, many new hires quickly become disillusioned, disappointed, or even angry when they find out after starting that their real job compares little to the one outlined in the interview. This can result in poor early job performance or early resignations.

A realistic job preview should include both positive and negative aspects of the job. It can be a video, a site walk-through, or merely a list of the positive and negative aspects of the job. You can develop a list of positive and negative job features through an anonymous survey of recent hires and people currently in the job. It generally includes not just the types of bad and good things that occur, but also their frequency of occurrence.

Ask candidates what they require for success. Many candidates fail on the job not because they don’t have the required skills, but because they are not provided with the right information, tools, or guidance. That’s why it’s important to ask finalists, “If you’re hired, what would you require in order to be successful?” By identifying candidates’ key success factors and needs, you can determine if those are even possible before you hire them, and you can provide that list to the direct supervisor, who can utilise the list to ensure that new employees’ needs are met so that they can get off to a fast and successful start. The goal here is to create a win-win by taking care of your new hire's needs.

Make sure you have a solid orientation program in place. Even a great hiring process can’t guarantee that you won’t end up with low performers and high turnover rates. This is because the selection process is only the first step to success. The seeds of on-the-job failure can begin the very first day on the job if the new hire’s orientation experience goes awry.

For example, if the new hire starts and on their first day their manager is nowhere to be found, it can confuse and disorient them. During the first week, frustration and other problems can occur if the new hire has no uniform, work schedule, or training manual. The absence of managers and the frustration of not having the necessary tools might lead a new hire to develop poor habits that will permanently affect their productivity. In addition, poor orientation might cause candidates to develop such a negative attitude about the firm that they may prematurely quit.

Avoid ‘candidate abuse’, high offer - rejection rates and early turnover

Even if you accurately assess the candidate, you are likely to lose candidates if you mistreat them during the interview and hiring process. In fact, several companies have found that the highest reason for offer letter rejection is ‘candidate abuse’ during the hiring process. Some of the ways to decrease candidate abuse, and subsequently increase offer acceptance rates, include:

Stop doing stupid things during interviews. Sometimes interviewing managers can be the cause of high offer rejection rates. By taking phone calls during interviews, cancelling and rescheduling interviews, appearing disorganised, or even asking illegal or silly questions, interviewers can easily scare away top candidates.

Remember, great hiring only starts with effective skill assessment. If you disillusion or discourage top candidates, they will simply make up an excuse to drop out of the running or say no to your offer. Incidentally, you can only find out the real reason why they rejected your offer by asking them six months later.

Stop ‘death by interview’. Many companies avoid the use of testing candidates due to possible liability and have become increasingly conservative in how they screen candidates. As a result of this fear, companies have increased the number of interviews to make up for the absence of other screening tools. In some cases, interviews have proliferated like rabbits. Where one or two interviews used to be common, now multiple interviews are frequently the norm.

The net result of this trend is that candidates must endure a large number of interviews that are generally spread out over a painfully long time period. From the candidate’s perspective, attending a large number of interviews on different days is expensive and time-consuming. The long delays and the uncertainty stress candidates and their families. The burden is even worse, however, because in a down economy, the odds of all that time and effort actually resulting in a job offer are actually pretty small. By reducing the number of interviews, holding them at night, and even trying to have them all completed on the same day, can reduce top candidate dropout rates and increase offer acceptance rates.

Stop ‘death by repetition’. In a related matter, when candidates are subjected to multiple interviews (at the same company) it is quite common for different interviewers to ask exactly the same questions in back-to-back interviews. This tedious repetition is often because interviews by different managers are not planned or coordinated. It is also partially caused by interview training manuals, which, by suggesting appropriate questions to use in an interview, can inadvertently cause interviewers to use the same questions over and over.

From the candidate’s perspective, having to answer duplicate questions over and over is frustrating and confusing. Lack of preparation can cause some managers to ask questions whose answers are clearly right on the resume, wasting valuable time and frustrating the candidate even further. By reducing the total number of interview questions and then assigning the appropriate interview questions to individual managers (based on their knowledge area), you can reduce repetition, candidate frustration, and offer rejections.

Don’t keep candidates in the dark. Another all-too-common abuse of candidates occurs when managers keep candidates in the dark about the interview process and what is expected during it. Candidates are not told about what will occur during the interview and what skills will be assessed. In addition, they are frequently not told who will be there during the interview and what the role of each interviewer is.

This lack of information leads to confusion and frustration on the part of the powerless candidate – all for no reason. There is no legal regulation that prohibits companies from telling candidates upfront about the process and what is being assessed during it. Failing to educate the candidate may cause candidates to over-prepare in unimportant areas and under-prepare in important ones. Not knowing who will participate in the interview prevents the candidate from doing research on the background of the interviewers. By telling the candidate more, you can limit their frustration and increase the likelihood that they will provide the information you need to make an accurate hiring decision.

Reduce interview overload by discouraging less than qualified applicants from applying. You are less likely to waste time and be fooled by less-than-qualified or uninterested candidates if you work with a recruiter. Also, you might consider these approaches:

• Put automated self-assessment company culture and skill assessment tools on your website so that candidates can pre-screen themselves in or out of the process before it formally begins.

• Make a list with specific numbers of the disqualification factors that will significantly lower or eliminate their chances of getting the position. Put them on the website, along with the job description, as a pre-warning that they will not qualify if they meet any of the disqualification criteria.

• Post your average job acceptance/failure rate (in percentages) for applicants, so that people know upfront that the odds of anyone (other than the most qualified candidates) of getting the job are very low.

• Be highly selective in where you advertize your jobs, and create links to your website. Don’t place them in general interest publications. Instead, study the demographics of the most qualified people and place ads or job openings exclusively where it is highly likely that only the most experienced and qualified individuals will read them.

• Post frequently asked questions and their answers on your website. By providing these questions and answers, you can discourage individuals who would have not applied had they known in advance the answer to their specific question.

In the end, tt’s essential that recruiters and managers take a more realistic and critical view of the traditional interviewing and selection process. Rather then assuming that it’s perfect, they should instead examine it closely to identify its many nearly fatal flaws.

In fact, if you look at the validity and reliability of interviews as a scientist would, you’ll find the accuracy of the process to be appallingly low. Why managers and recruiters consistently ignore these facts is confusing, but such ignorance is unacceptable because weak hiring systems and bad hires cost firms millions of dollars.

The average cost of a bad hire is two times salary and when customer contact is involved, the costs can easily exceed half a million dollars. Instead of being complacent, managers and recruiters need to take a fresh look at the process and the metrics or measures that they use to calculate the percentage of ‘duds’ that they hire.

The approaches outlined above can dramatically improve new hire success rates. Because they include less freedom and subjectivity than the traditional interview process, they will produce higher offer acceptance rates as well as new hires who are productive and faster, who stay longer, and who are more satisfied with their jobs.

Happy at Work?

Amazingly, most of us will spend half of our waking lives at work. Are you happy?

Few people can combine earning a living with a genuine passion. Most people essentially trade half of their life in return for money to enjoy the other half.

Yet, we can find great meaning in our work without that job having to be cancer research or working for Greenpeace. We just need to find the meaning within the work we're doing or make that meaning clear.


Step 1. Find the purpose

Essentially, we all want to feel part of something bigger, so the first step is seeing that bigger picture or purpose in our work. For leaders, it can be as simple as focusing on the why, as much as the how, when communicating with teams. Of course, the purpose needs to feel inherently meaningful. Profits are a perfectly good goal but they make a lousy purpose.

For many teams, we think the customer experience can provide that bigger purpose. It's not world peace, but improving the customer experience is a lot more inherently meaningful than just increasing margins. A focus on customer experience is essentially about understanding customers and creating a positive experience for them. Making them feel good. Even if we're selling hot dogs, we can find some inherent meaning in improving the customer's experience during that sale.


We humans aren't such a bad bunch; for the most part we actually enjoy making other people happy, especially those drawn to working in hospitality. You know the little thrill we get when someone drops something in the street we can hand it back to them? It took no real effort on our part, of course, but we still enjoy having done a good thing. Almost all of us are hard-wired with a little empathy and generosity. We find some meaning in focusing on another person's experience.

Step 2. See the individual contribution

Next, once we have an effort worth being part of, we need to see the individual role we personally play in that overall effort. We empathetic, generous humans are also a more than a little egotistical. So although we want to be part of something bigger, we don't want to disappear completely within it. We're each only one small piece of the puzzle, but we'd like that piece to be noticed and valuable in some way.

Step 3. Encourage ideas

And finally, step three: we want our ideas to be heard. It's another of our human quirks: the desire to have our input considered and to feel that we have some impact on the way things are done. Ask me my opinion, listen to my suggestions and I'll feel much more ownership of our shared goals.


So, the good news is that we're never more than three steps away from making any role meaningful - whether it's answering the phone, making ads or selling insurance. Which is just as well, because we can't all save the whales.

Employee Terminations

At the first sign of an employee performance issue, it is incumbent upon the corporate supervisor or manager to initiate a company disciplinary program. This includes corrective action, written records, and verbal discussions. Should the employee's performance remain outside the company's expectations, then proper follow through with a written dismissal and an exit interview is necessary for the mutual benefit of the employee and employer.

It is estimated that over 80% of all employment lawsuits arise from termination or disciplinary proceedings. Therefore, actions related to such proceedings should be undertaken carefully, responsibly, and tactfully.

Is The Termination A Surprise?
If the disciplinary program is handled properly by the manager yet not successful in changing the employee performance, then termination should not come as a surprise to the employee.

More often that not, a good predictor of a disgruntled former employee who decides to sue their employer is if the employee would be legitimately surprised with the decision to terminate his or her employment. Of course, there will always be the employee who refuses to see that he or she had ever done anything wrong, despite the employer's best efforts to place the employee on notice of its dissatisfaction with their performance. However, if the employer made every effort to notify the employee of specific performance issues through written warnings and verbal discussions, the employee should have seen "the writing on the wall" by the time the issue of his or her termination is raised. On the other hand, if the decision is "out of the blue," the employee may begin to consider whether the "real" reason behind the termination was based on unreasonable or unlawful motives.

Write It Down
The employer must maintain a written record of employee warnings and verbal discussions around employee performance and, where necessary, prepare a written separation notice stating the reason for the employee's discharge.

While virtually every manager today recognizes the need for documentation, it's lack still remains the single most common mistake in terminations. Managers must recognize that their companies may have to explain a termination decision long after it occurs. Documentation is necessary when memories are dim as to the circumstances of the termination or when the individuals involved are no longer with the employer. The absence of documentation may allow the terminated individual to create an inference that the employer’s motivation for an employment action was for reasons other than those stated.

While the need to document is clear, it is equally important that managers understand that poorly prepared documentation may well hurt an employer’s case. While there is no particular required format, the manager should ensure that all disciplinary documentation contains the following elements:

1.the date of the termination;
2.the signature of the person with proper authority to terminate the employee;
3.the signature of the employee (if presented in person to the employee);
4.the specific reason for the termination in detail;
5.notification of employee rights and the rights of any qualified beneficiaries to continue health care coverage after the termination; and
6.contact information should the employee have questions on matters contained in the termination notice.

Also, you may request that the employee
1.return employer property and/or equipment;
2.return the employer Handbook;
3.return keys, credit cards, entry cards, and/or ID cards;
4.deliver all email and computer-related passwords;
5.clean out his or her desk, office, locker, etc.;

Importantly, the employer should make certain that the reason for the employee’s termination can be substantiated. Therefore, the employer may wish to temper the reason for the termination to the actual information known to the employer at the time of the termination. For instance, if the employer desires to terminate an employee due to stealing employer funds, however, the employee has yet to be convicted of any crime, the proper termination notice would state the reason as "terminated due to suspicion of theft of employer property, " rather than "terminated due to stealing." The key word in the notice is suspicion.

The employer’s subsequent inability to prove the stated reason for the discharge understandably makes the reason suspect. Moreover, the inclusion of a reason that is not truthful may expose the employer to a defamation claim when the employer includes that reason in other documents prepared in connection with the termination.

The Termination Meeting

At the termination meeting, the manager conducting the meeting should explain as objectively and unemotionally as possible the reasons behind the employer’s decision to discharge that employee. A witness also should be present. Most importantly, the details of the termination meeting should be documented by one of the individuals present, preferably the witness who is otherwise minimally involved in the discussion. It generally is not advisable to tape-record the meeting. Instead, the employer should take notes of what occurs.

After the termination meeting, the following checklist should be considered by the employer:
1.Place the termination notice in the employee's personnel file.
2.After reviewing their accuracy, place any notations made during the termination meeting in the employee's personnel file.
3.Has the employee been compensated for hours worked and any unpaid but accrued leave that the employer agrees to pay or by law is required to pay? If not, have an appropriate cheque cut.
4.Have the pension plan administrators been contacted in order to ascertain the options available to employees, as well as the proper methods to be used in informing employees of their rights under the plan?
5.Have the appropriate Department of Labor forms regarding unemployment insurance compensation been sent to the correct agency?
6.Have the employer's property and equipment been returned?
7.Have the employee's computer and email passwords been delivered and/or deactivated?
8.Have the employee's keys, credit cards, entry cards, and/or ID cards been returned?

Beyond corrective action, one of the best ways to avoid potential future conflicts is by conducting an exit interview. This type of meeting is a highly underutilized method of learning information that may benefit the employer by finding out causes of employee turnover and also help the employer identify potential lawsuits at a very early stage and avoid them through early discussion or conciliation with the employee. An employer should take all necessary measures to insure that the discharge meeting is conducted in a sensitive and fair manner.

Given that the vast majority of employment lawsuits arise out of involuntary terminations, it is important that companies consistently assess their policies and procedures related to the discipline and, if necessary, the termination of their employees. Such policies and procedures, if created, maintained and followed by all employees, can have a substantial impact on company morale, staff performance, and the number of lawsuits a company faces.