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Speaking as a business owner actively hiring... the cost of a mishire is huge. It is difficult to understate mishire costs. This means you have to simply spend

Speaking as a business owner actively hiring... the cost of a mishire is huge. It is difficult to understate mishire costs. This means you have to simply spend a lot of time with candidates. Even then you have a narrow window of time, relative to how long the business and employee have to live with one another, to figure out if it is a match. This means you will say no to a lot of people after investing significant time and effort into them (and them into your business). We owe it to our teams to hire well. If that means making it harder, so be it. Think about if it is easier for the wrong people to slip in under the radar. It can wreck culture and team quick. Most teams and businesses dont spend enough time. In Work Rules (Bock) they found the first four long interviews they did helped a lot at Google. After that interviews added one percent accuracy in judging a hire. It is a hard problem and I think the first and foremost goal in any hiring process that is well developed aims to make good hires the #1 priority. I won't discount your theory of a bias, but I think it is a small influencer if it exists.

vinceguidry 10y ago
In my experience, hiring is the most political act a company does, meaning individual goals very often take priority over company goals. Well above avoiding mishires, loyalty concerns are paramount in every organization I've worked for. You'd think that they'd treat hiring as the quintessential bet-the-company decision, and operate accordingly, but this simply doesn't happen. Leadership creates policies and procedures designed to introduce opacity in the process with the ostensible goal of avoiding mishires, but the real goal of preserving power.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  Agree. The best thing a business can do is standardize their hiring practices to weed out intentional and unintentional bias and politics. It is hard, though, but possible. Guess that is why I love working in a small business. We keep it transparent and real. We just want to hack things and work with good people.
sokoloff 10y ago
> the cost of a mishire is huge. Absolutely agree and I'll add that you're shopping in a market for lemons. There are multiple adverse selection criteria against the pool of job seekers. (Excellent engineers are more likely to be retained/less likely to be fired. Excellent engineers are more likely to receive an offer when they do interview. Poor engineers are less likely to be retained, more likely to be fired, less likely to be hired.) In steady state, the applicant pool is of lower overall average quality than the pool of employed engineers.
- digler999 10y ago
  There was (who I feel was) a mishire at my job. I haven't seen him produce a single work-product since he started 6 months ago. I get the sense that he's worth more to the company (a large tech conglomerate) as a write-off than he is a producer to the team.
  - hackerboos 10y ago
    We recently hired an ops guy into a dev role and the guy just does not know what he's doing. Merging his own pull requests before code review or before tests have passed the build system. Downs development/staging servers because he's "testing something" and forgets to bring them back up. Our place has a 12-month contract before being made perm. Once you are perm you are not getting let go unless it's part of larger cutbacks (government). He was made perm before 12 months and I was astounded. They didn't even ask me what I thought before they did it.
CoolGuySteve 10y ago
> Speaking as a business owner actively hiring Can you quantify? I read this all the time but nobody explains it. Meanwhile, this talking point is used to justify an atrocious waste of interviewee time and ridiculous interview requirements.
- flat6turbo 10y ago
  1. the project slips while you expect your new hire to work, and they don't deliver. 2. opportunity cost of actually hiring someone good - by the time you've realized you've made a mistake, a good person is off the market. 3. you actually have to pay a bad hire for their time. you can't just not pay them. that's cold hard cash out the door. 4. everyone on the team starts wondering, how the hell did this guy make it through this process? are we being run by idiots? 5. if the hire is remote in another state, you have to register your business with their tax authorities, and deal with that whole payroll rigamarole. 6. also health insurance bullshit. 7. setting up accounts, changing passwords/keys when they get canned. 8. actually firing them is not fun unless you are a total sociopath, or they are actively causing damage by destroying value (which is extremely rare -- most people will just silently not do a fucking thing for weeks on end). 9. worrying about a lawsuit because ironically, people who cause damage like to threaten these things. this is on top of your already full workload of doing actual, productive things for actual paying customers and good employees.
- patio11 10y ago
  It's virtually impossible for most companies to manage someone out in less than six months. They're earning full freight salary for each of those six months. Many of your overhead costs like e.g. recruiting fees, new machinery, training, come due within that period and are not refundable. This only costs actual cash outlay, not opportunity cost of other team members (could be coding but are instead spinning up the new engineer), overhead from management salaries, cost to redo work of an other-than-productive employee, etc. At Valley salaries hiring someone for a day costs you $100k++. In more moderately compensated locales, lower bound it at $40k or so.
  - sethev 10y ago
throw_away_777 10y ago
The cost of a mishire is huge and obvious, but don't discount the cost of passing up on a good hire, which is much less visible. But every time a good candidate is passed on, the odds of a mishire go up. There isn't any way to determine with certainty whether a hire will work out or not before they take the job.
- hinkley 10y ago
  Also, take care of the good hires you already have. Everybody takes their people for granted. I don't think I've ever heard a manager even say the phrase 'turnover' until they have a few ex-employees that they really couldn't afford to have lost, and a bunch of disgruntled people still there. Once the horse has left it's too late to close the barn.
  - bitexploder 10y ago
    So much this. Talent management is more than hiring.

vinceguidry 10y ago

In my experience, hiring is the most political act a company does, meaning individual goals very often take priority over company goals. Well above avoiding mishires, loyalty concerns are paramount in every organization I've worked for. You'd think that they'd treat hiring as the quintessential bet-the-company decision, and operate accordingly, but this simply doesn't happen. Leadership creates policies and procedures designed to introduce opacity in the process with the ostensible goal of avoiding mishires, but the real goal of preserving power.

bitexploder 10y ago
Agree. The best thing a business can do is standardize their hiring practices to weed out intentional and unintentional bias and politics. It is hard, though, but possible. Guess that is why I love working in a small business. We keep it transparent and real. We just want to hack things and work with good people.

sokoloff 10y ago

> the cost of a mishire is huge. Absolutely agree and I'll add that you're shopping in a market for lemons. There are multiple adverse selection criteria against the pool of job seekers. (Excellent engineers are more likely to be retained/less likely to be fired. Excellent engineers are more likely to receive an offer when they do interview. Poor engineers are less likely to be retained, more likely to be fired, less likely to be hired.) In steady state, the applicant pool is of lower overall average quality than the pool of employed engineers.

digler999 10y ago
There was (who I feel was) a mishire at my job. I haven't seen him produce a single work-product since he started 6 months ago. I get the sense that he's worth more to the company (a large tech conglomerate) as a write-off than he is a producer to the team.
- hackerboos 10y ago
  We recently hired an ops guy into a dev role and the guy just does not know what he's doing. Merging his own pull requests before code review or before tests have passed the build system. Downs development/staging servers because he's "testing something" and forgets to bring them back up. Our place has a 12-month contract before being made perm. Once you are perm you are not getting let go unless it's part of larger cutbacks (government). He was made perm before 12 months and I was astounded. They didn't even ask me what I thought before they did it.

CoolGuySteve 10y ago

> Speaking as a business owner actively hiring Can you quantify? I read this all the time but nobody explains it. Meanwhile, this talking point is used to justify an atrocious waste of interviewee time and ridiculous interview requirements.

flat6turbo 10y ago
1. the project slips while you expect your new hire to work, and they don't deliver. 2. opportunity cost of actually hiring someone good - by the time you've realized you've made a mistake, a good person is off the market. 3. you actually have to pay a bad hire for their time. you can't just not pay them. that's cold hard cash out the door. 4. everyone on the team starts wondering, how the hell did this guy make it through this process? are we being run by idiots? 5. if the hire is remote in another state, you have to register your business with their tax authorities, and deal with that whole payroll rigamarole. 6. also health insurance bullshit. 7. setting up accounts, changing passwords/keys when they get canned. 8. actually firing them is not fun unless you are a total sociopath, or they are actively causing damage by destroying value (which is extremely rare -- most people will just silently not do a fucking thing for weeks on end). 9. worrying about a lawsuit because ironically, people who cause damage like to threaten these things. this is on top of your already full workload of doing actual, productive things for actual paying customers and good employees.
patio11 10y ago
It's virtually impossible for most companies to manage someone out in less than six months. They're earning full freight salary for each of those six months. Many of your overhead costs like e.g. recruiting fees, new machinery, training, come due within that period and are not refundable. This only costs actual cash outlay, not opportunity cost of other team members (could be coding but are instead spinning up the new engineer), overhead from management salaries, cost to redo work of an other-than-productive employee, etc. At Valley salaries hiring someone for a day costs you $100k++. In more moderately compensated locales, lower bound it at $40k or so.
- sethev 10y ago

throw_away_777 10y ago

The cost of a mishire is huge and obvious, but don't discount the cost of passing up on a good hire, which is much less visible. But every time a good candidate is passed on, the odds of a mishire go up. There isn't any way to determine with certainty whether a hire will work out or not before they take the job.

hinkley 10y ago
Also, take care of the good hires you already have. Everybody takes their people for granted. I don't think I've ever heard a manager even say the phrase 'turnover' until they have a few ex-employees that they really couldn't afford to have lost, and a bunch of disgruntled people still there. Once the horse has left it's too late to close the barn.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  So much this. Talent management is more than hiring.