I took a chance on an under-qualified candidate and it’s not working out
A reader writes:
I recently made a hire for a mid-level job in my organization, and hired someone I was extremely excited about. We clicked in his interview and I had some warm personal recommendations. His experience in our field was light, and there were a few red flags in the application process, but I felt that he was teachable and worth taking a chance on.
Four months later, I can conclude I was disastrously wrong. He has struggled to grasp the material of the job, to arrive at work on time (with a few near no-shows thrown in for good measure), to demonstrate professional courtesy to colleagues, and to pick up on company culture. We are nearing the point of termination. The problem is, I feel responsible for getting this guy into this mess by hiring him despite the red flags and relative lack of experience, almost a sense of “you break it, you bought it.” I know the professional world doesn’t operate like that, but I wonder what your perspective is after all these years.
It’s hard to say without knowing exactly what you saw in the hiring process that made you want to take a chance on him, and exactly what red flags you were seeing in the process too.
If you hired him because you liked him on a personal level (or he reminded you of yourself or similar), that’s a common type of bias that leads to bad hiring decisions and which managers really need to be mindful of. It also tends to be heavily linked to demographics that shouldn’t influence hiring decisions, like race and age. If you think, in retrospect, that that was part of it, the lesson to take forward is the importance of assessing candidates against on a clear list of must-have’s for the work, so you can’t easily be sidetracked by personally liking someone.
On the other hand, if you hired him because, although he didn’t have experience doing the work, you saw genuine evidence in his history that he’d excel at it, and you had reason to believe you could coach him on the parts he didn’t know, that might be more reasonable. It still might not have been the right decision, if other candidates were objectively stronger — but sometimes trying this out and getting it wrong is how you get better at hiring. And of course, sometimes it works! If your bet had paid off, this would all look different in hindsight.
All that said, I do think there’s an obligation to tell someone when you’re putting them in that situation — to explain where they’re going to have a learning curve and how you’re prepared to support them, with the caveat that they’ll need to work to learn XYZ — so they can make an informed decision for themselves about whether it’s a risk they want to take on.
The post I took a chance on an under-qualified candidate and it’s not working out appeared first on Ask a Manager.
Source: www.askamanager.org