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Hiring: A Haiku
By Robert | September 8, 2005
Here is a Management Haiku by yours truly:
Hiring poorly,
Infects, like a virus.
Demise may follow.
A bad hire is like a virus. Infection is easier than eradication: Serious illness often precedes recovery, with demise the most extreme of consequences.
The discipline of hiring well is apparently one of the most difficult things to maintain in the software development world. This seems especially prevalent in larger software organizations where HR departments implement highly structured policies regarding hiring quotas, place limits on the time to fill a requisition, and often publish highly generalized job qualifications. Junior managers seem especially rushed to fill requisitions as the messaging from corporate HQ broadcasts “fill it or lose it.”
As with most anything rushed, one of the first things to drop is the hiring standard.
Lowering standards is one of the most dangerous things that a manager can do when building her team. The codebase is put towards greater risk; senior members of the team need to spend more time helping out the bad hire. They will need to expend extra effort to fix and prevent mistakes. If this continues to become a problem, your best team members will simply quit, as the best are the ones most likely find a better job elsewhere. What’s worse is that with current labor laws, and an increasingly litigious atmosphere, it has become incredibly difficult to fire someone, even if he is a poor performer.
From a product quality perspective, you are better off losing your requisition than risk being stuck with a bad hire. I really have no good recipe if you are stuck in an organization whose policies and culture do not understand this problem, other than you need to be especially savvy in the political arena to build a spectacular team. Otherwise, hold out for the best candidate that fits the job. For those thinking bottom-line: I’d rather pay 50% above the mean salary for a candidate well above-average than having three guys that suck and paying up to three times the average for all of them.
Topics: Management |