When in Doubt, Should You Hire?
Sometimes you get lucky. Five minutes into the interview you know that the person across the table is the perfect match for your needs and team. Most of the time you don’t. Given today’s war for talent, after weeks of searching it’s easy to find yourself face-to-face with someone who sorta meets your needs, has coin-flip odds on working out, and you’re on the fence about taking a chance on them. Your team’s drowning in work, and after several terrible interviewees you’re relived to be talking to someone seemingly half-competent. Should you hire them?
How Could This Go?
Let’s break the outcome down into four possibilities:
Obviously if the on-the-fence candidate you hired ends up being a winner, that’s great news! But if they crash-and-burn, you have not one but two problems. Their own underperformance, and the impact it has on the rest of the team.
“Mercy Hires” Can Be Mean
Giving someone a job feels good. We’ve all experienced the disheartening toilfest called job hunting, and the rock-in-the-stomach feeling that rejection leaves in us, so to break someone out and offer them purpose, status, and financial security can almost feel like an act of altruism. Therefore it can be hard to reject someone in this state when all they want is for you to say two simple words: “you’re hired”.
But by offering kindness and taking a chance on a borderline candidate, you may be setting them up for more pain later. When someone’s not cut out for a role, the later they know about it, the more painful it’s going to be for them to learn, due to the amount of time and energy they’ve invested.
The best time to give feedback is as early as possible, and by not hiring someone who may underperform, you may be saving them a lot of future pain and uncertainty.
The Spider Web of Underperformance
When someone’s struggling in their role, the effects spread well beyond them and their manager. Their team bears the brunt of it. When the team has to frequently double-check, re-work, or deal with fallout from someone’s output, their days can suddenly become busier than when the position was still open. This understandably can lead to frustration, and exacerbate the burnout that hiring was supposed to reduce.
This situation can also wreck havoc on perceived expectations. Regardless of how the manager communicates role expectations, high-performing team members may start to wonder “why am I working so hard when this person’s at my same level and doing half of what I do?”. This can lead to feelings of unfairness, and decimate a high-performing culture.
You’re Probably not a Hiring Savant
Still, it’s easy to see an on-the-fence candidate as a potential “diamond in the rough”. They may be fumbling through your problem-solving or situational questions, and their domain knowledge is questionable, but you like them, and you see a “fire in their eyes” which indicates they’ll succeed regardless of their demonstrated knowledge and abilities.
Legends are told of hiring managers who “took a shot” on someone who didn’t interview well but became excellent, and it’s tempting to not want this reputation yourself. But for every surprise star there’s at least two borderline hires who don’t pan out.
Truth is assessing capability and potential for a complex role via a one-page piece of paper and one to three hours of Q&A is really hard. While most industries have gotten better at hiring, their reliability continues to be less-than-bulletproof. Given the challenge of assessment and stakes at-play, unless your team’s desperate for more hands I’d recommend hiring only if you feel highly confident that they’ll succeed. It’s better for you, your team, and even the person at the other end of the table in the long-run.
Footnote: I personally don’t think this conflicts w/ adapting more inclusive hiring practices, but let me know what you think. Though harder to assess, I focus on potential, intelligence, and behavior for more junior roles, over schools and experience. I think this provides a more fair playing field.
