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The Mistake of “Hire and Forget”
This is part two of Hiring with a Purpose. You can read part one here.
When I was a manager, unfilled positions were one of my biggest headaches. They required me, or members of the team, to cover for the vacancies. Heaven forbid if it was a specialist slot that could not be easily covered. I once had a therapist sit in with a temporary doctor to type notes because patients had to be seen.
Obviously, I am not alone in these experiences. When I became a CEO, I heard them from my directors and from their managers. Everyone was focused on getting those slots filled as fast as they could.
In the military, there is a type of missile called “Fire and Forget”. It does not require further guidance after launch and can hit its target without you being within line-of-sight.
What I have seen in business is the mistake I call “Hire and Forget”. After multiple resumes, a number of interviews and an affirmative response from a candidate, the manager finally has someone to fill the opening. The candidate is sent to Human Resources, and the manager, breathing a sigh of relief, can move on to the next crisis.
Perhaps the new employee will receive some one-on-one time post orientation, but usually by 30 days later, it is business as usual. The employee is hired and HR becomes the guidance system to get the new employee to target.
Meanwhile, the manager is frequently focused on tasks other than being a manager. This is often because they earned their promotions because of their output. Being down a position regularly means the output is reduced, but that should not be an excuse to ignore the new hire.
Lack of feedback and support from managers is among the top reasons people report leaving jobs. Find the time to have one-on-one talks about the challenges of the job and about how to meet expectations. If your employee knows you are engaged with her, then she is more likely to remain a long-term employee.
Hiring someone is not sending a missile to blow something up, it is adding, maintaining, and often building an asset for your organization. The number one way to have engaged employees is to have engaged managers.
Not all positions, however, are going to be filled long-term. Lower-level positions tend to have high turnover.
In a previous role, we had positions with an extremely high turnover rate due to low pay and high stress. The quality of employees we were attracting was commonly less than what the program director was seeking. So we decided to stop fighting the turnover trend and embrace it. Instead of seeking long-term employees, we looked to new graduates with college degrees in psychology who were working towards their masters.
We knew we would only have them for two to three years at the most, but by adjusting our expectations we found good employees who could work flexible hours.
The art of hiring and maintaining excellent employees, of building an asset for your organization, is not about hiring and forgetting, it is about having managers who find the time to engage their workers individually and as members of the team.
Hire and Inspire should be your weapon of choice.
This article was originally published at TalkForward as part of my monthly series of thought leadership articles.
Published in General
I have a future article that will be called “Pay in Place”
My answer is that we should not promote people to reward them. Would you rather be operated on by the world’s best heart doctor, or someone being managed by the world’s best heart doctor?
There are also many ways to recognize and reward others besides pay.
Gallup studies show that only around 1 in 10 people are good naturally at being managers, and only another 1 in 8 can be taught. That is less than 1 in 5 people overall.
It explains a lot.
Yep.
“Promotion” is a strange word. It means certain definite things to a worker and his family, friends, and society, both the society of his enterprise and to the outside world. It has a psychological weight, and an income expectation.
To the businessman it should mean something completely different, and neither of the two senses above. In fact, he can afford to mentally discard it, except when imagining himself in the role of his employee, to anticipate the employee’s reaction.
The businessman per se (not as a caring, moral human being with both responsibilities and desires beyond seeing his business survive and thrive financially), unlike a worker,
If someone does not care for his or her employees, they are going to know it. Caring for others is hard to fake for anyone who is not a psychopath. I strongly disagree with #1 there. If goes against every leadership principle I stand for and believe in.
Bryan,
Please carefully re-read my Comment. You could not have more completely mis-read it.
I have re-read it.
It is quite clear you are saying that he businessman does not care about the worker except that showing that care helps to have better employees.
I say that is inhuman and wrong. You cannot fake caring about people simply because it gets the right results. As the boss, you should care about your employees because it is the right thing to do. It is the cornerstone of my approach to leadership, and is the basis for great companies. The studies on this back me up. Great managers and great leaders care about their followers.
As a leader, it is my duty to be invested in the outcomes for the people who follow me. Their success is more important than mine. I will be lifted on their rising tide. What you are espousing is a machiavellian faking of caring so that one gets the right outcome. Well, it does not work. Employees can see through that in almost every case. It takes a true sociopath to pull that off.
Mark, it seems like you want to apply some dry, economic theories to the leader-follower relationship. I am hear to say that relationships are “wet”, messy, process driven things. People are not numbers, and relationships are not souless transactions. Any theory that leads you to think that a candidate for a job has the same power in the relationship as the interviewer is flat wrong. Any theory that leads you to think that the way to lead is to fake interest in your followers is flat wrong.
Bryan, and others who interpreted that sentence the same way:
I believe the precise opposite of the idea you’ve ascribed to me. I believe that the businessman cares about the worker, independently of any business considerations*.
* * * * * * * *
(* I doubt that you’d be interested in an explanation of how the above sentence implies that, and not what you thought it says. It would just be “talking semantics”, and I am well aware of the distaste you have for semantics.
Just trust me.)
In communication, the person speaking has a responsibility to be understood. Every person I have shown this too understood it the way I did. I would suggest that means the encoding of the message was flawed. I will take you at your word that is not what you meant.
Thanks for the survey results, and for your opinion about my responsibility for the misunderstanding.