Dirty Secrets of Small Business

Dirty Secrets of Small Business


How Do I Know I Just Hired the Wrong Person?

September 10, 2020

In This Episode
I don’t care how long you’re in business, it never gets easy to let someone go.  Especially if that person is in a more senior position and you’ve just recently hired them.  So how do you know it’s time to let someone go?
During the show today we touched on several of the “feelings” you get when you’ve hired the wrong person.  It’s often more than just your gut or “spidey senses” poking at you.  No matter how long you are in business, you will always make wrong hires, the question is what do you do about it.
One of the key things we focus all of our clients on is the 90-day trial for a new employee.  During this 90-day trial period you will get to see this person operating in real time on real issues in your company.  While most people can “fake” things in the short term, including interviews, after a few weeks or months the real person shows up.  If you set a stake in the ground at 90 days it gives both you and the new hire time to reflect on how things have been going and decide if you should keep going forward.  You’d be amazed at how many folks take themselves out before being fired as they can usually feel when something isn’t quite the right fit.
The worst thing to do when you’re feeling like you’ve hired the wrong person is to do nothing.  Or think that “they’ll change” or that you can “fix them” because that won’t happen.  We encourage our clients to be very decisive and humane about this as the situation just isn’t working out.  During the show we made several analogies for what it’s like when you’re dating someone and you know it’s not the right fit.  Some people wind up dating for years, heck some even get married, even though they knew early on it wasn’t quite the right fit.  Don’t do that with your company.