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I just don't really understand this "hire and fire" mentality. I took over running a group, and one of the first things I did was fire someone - he was really,

I just don't really understand this "hire and fire" mentality. I took over running a group, and one of the first things I did was fire someone - he was really, really not productive, nobody respected him, etc. But it was a terrible experience. I never want to do that again. What happened to finding better ways at hiring good people? Sure, times change, and yeah, you'll have to let a few go over time. All of these companies just seem to go with a test drive approach. And I rarely find any new, novel approaches on hiring practices. These sorts of practices seem to breed a very impersonal culture, that just makes me biased against big companies. A culture I hope I'm never a part of again. This article is pretty novel in that it's about Enron. But I'm sure you could substitute many more legitimate businesses, and the techniques would be pretty similar.

lionhearted 17y ago
> I took over running a group, and one of the first things I did was fire someone - he was really, really not productive, nobody respected him, etc. But it was a terrible experience. I never want to do that again. Yeah, I've done it too. Very hard letting someone go. Terrible experience. But you do get people that are a bad fit in their roles, that shouldn't be in them. It's not just bad for a company - it's bad for their coworkers, bad for customers, and maybe it's the worst to the person who is doing a bad job. It must be self esteem crushing to not ever accomplish anything interesting or valuable in the place you spend the most waking hours. So I wonder if the hire-and-fire-regularly cultures do so to desensitize the people there to the process? Everyone I know that runs a moderate to large company or division either lets people go regularly or has a lot of people who are a bad fit on their staff. Which goes into point 2: > What happened to finding better ways at hiring good people? You try, but it's impossible to always get right. Jack Welch was generally regarded as one of the best hiring people of all time, and I listened to an interview of him on hiring. He said that he always thought of it like a "batting average" - how many hires are a good fit and mesh well? He says his best rates, even towards the very end of his career, was getting about 2 out of 3 right. That means 1 out of 3 wrong. You ought to spend some effort trying to get someone on track, but having a person who is a bad fit onboard is no good for anyone. The best way to fix that, though, is a really hard question to answer.

lionhearted 17y ago

> I took over running a group, and one of the first things I did was fire someone - he was really, really not productive, nobody respected him, etc. But it was a terrible experience. I never want to do that again. Yeah, I've done it too. Very hard letting someone go. Terrible experience. But you do get people that are a bad fit in their roles, that shouldn't be in them. It's not just bad for a company - it's bad for their coworkers, bad for customers, and maybe it's the worst to the person who is doing a bad job. It must be self esteem crushing to not ever accomplish anything interesting or valuable in the place you spend the most waking hours. So I wonder if the hire-and-fire-regularly cultures do so to desensitize the people there to the process? Everyone I know that runs a moderate to large company or division either lets people go regularly or has a lot of people who are a bad fit on their staff. Which goes into point 2: > What happened to finding better ways at hiring good people? You try, but it's impossible to always get right. Jack Welch was generally regarded as one of the best hiring people of all time, and I listened to an interview of him on hiring. He said that he always thought of it like a "batting average" - how many hires are a good fit and mesh well? He says his best rates, even towards the very end of his career, was getting about 2 out of 3 right. That means 1 out of 3 wrong. You ought to spend some effort trying to get someone on track, but having a person who is a bad fit onboard is no good for anyone. The best way to fix that, though, is a really hard question to answer.