Top Ten: Bad hires

Bad hires happen to everyone eventually. Where it’s on minute one or month three, sometimes things just don’t work out the way you planned. You can’t always assess a perfect cultural fit, or prevent external factors out of your control from changing your darling hire into a morale-destroying monster. But if you keep a watchful eye out you can recognise these key warning signs that you may have made a bad hire, before they do too much damage.

1. Very early into their new role they took full advantage of your “Make your desk like home!” initiative by bringing in a menagerie of taxidermied small animals.

2. Prince Odogwu III seemed very genuine over e-mail, but he hasn’t shown up for work yet. For some reason he kept asking for your bank details over the phone too, but with references that strong you’re pretty sure you made the right call in hiring him.

3. You ended up falling for the two kids in a trenchcoat trick, again, and now you have a payroll nightmare on your hands. Why does this keep happening?

4. You didn’t really think that when the candidate said they had agoraphobia, that your open-plan office would qualify.

5. You can’t figure out whether they really do have ‘mild narcolepsy’ or are just playing the long-con on you.

6. It just so happened that the interview fell on their “monthly shower day.”

7. When they said they had experience in a ‘customer facing role’, what they meant was that they once walked behind the counter of a Starbucks.

8. You never realised that pets and babies weren’t the only instances of something needing potty training.

9. When you told them of their job offer in person, they laughed maniacally before swishing their cloak and disappearing in a cloud of bats. Working in a blood bank, you should have known it was coming one day.

10. You know that everybody deals with stress in different ways, but no matter how you frame it, flipping over your desk and howling like a monkey for five minutes over missing the last complementary flapjack just isn’t a proportionate response. Honestly though, that flapjack was great, and you’d take it again in a trice.

And remember, as the HRville mantra goes: “It’s not you, it’s them.” Happy hiring.

About the author

Jerome Langford

Jerome is a graduate in Philosophy from St Andrews, who alternately spends time writing about HR and staring wistfully out of windows, thinking about life’s bigger questions: Why are we here? How much lunch is too much lunch? What do you mean exactly by ‘final warning’?