Fix Your Mistakes

Joe certainly seemed like the right fit. His resume looked fantastic – lots of software development experience with big companies, all the right keywords, enough years to have gained good experience. His interview was pretty good – he stumbled through some of the questions but a case of the nerves could have easily explained that.

And it’s not like I wanted to be too picky at this point. I was under pressure to hire a developer while we still had approval. I had already interviewed at least ten possible candidates and my recruiter was starting to give me that look. The look that says “I’m getting tired of trying to find developers that will never meet your standards.” I had seen it before but always had enough confidence to put it aside. But interview fatigue was taking its toll on me.

So, I pulled the trigger and hired Joe.

A few weeks later, I started to hear rumblings that Joe might not be working out. I was still suffering from interview fatigue, so I willfully ignored the whispers and forced myself to believe that Joe was just going through some new-job jitters and would turn it around over the next week.

But when one of the lead developers came up to me and said that Joe wasn’t working out, I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I sat down with Joe and asked him to walk me through some of the work that he was doing. Within a couple of minutes, it was obvious that he was in over his head and didn’t stand much of a chance of recovering.

At this point, I had two choices with Joe:

1. work with him for six months in hope of training him to the level that I expected him to already be, or
2. admit my mistake and fire him.

Despite the fact that I was burned out from interview fatigue and realizing that firing Joe would send me down a path of more interviews, I sat down with Joe and gave him his two weeks notice.

There’s a simple reason for this – if you allow somebody to keep their job when they’re not performing up to par then you are sending a direct message to the rest of your team that they don’t need to perform up to par either. As Jim Collins said in “Good to Great“, you need to have the right people on the bus but it’s also important to get the wrong people off the bus.

Having an undermanned team makes it difficult to meet aggressive deadlines. But having a fully-staffed team that doesn’t contain the right people won’t make it any easier to meet those deadlines. Even worse, refusing to fix a hiring mistake will damage your credibility with your team, eroding the trust that every team needs in order to produce outstanding results.