Human Resorce Management

Summary of
Hiring without Firing

Common Pitfalls:

The article is an excellent primer which suggest what basic norms we must
follow in order to hire the right people who stay in the company for a decent
enough tenure. Here are the common pitfalls we must avoid:

1. The reactive approach: Once an employee leaves the company or is

fired the time between him getting fired and hiring someone else to
fill his position is a reactive one where we try and squeeze as much fit
as we can from the new person for the role. This sometimes ends up in
spoiling things than improving them.
2. Unrealistic expectation: Contradictory statements like “high energy
doer and thoughtful analyst”. It's more like combining all the qualities
that the person would end up working with in a consolidated form and
then hunting all that in him.
3. Evaluating people in absolute terms: “Joe is a good manager” now this
is a generic statement worth nothing because we are not specifying
what he is good at or anything like that and this might lead to
development of a false image of Joe.
4. Accepting people at face value: Nowadays candidates are habituated
towards not telling the complete story behind things and thus trying to
create a best view shot of themselves in the eyes of the interviewer.
For example: one person trying to get a job at Silicon Valley has
written he enjoyed lending to fast growing start-ups but he actually
had funded only 2 and rejected 150 now tis accurate but is it the truth
leading you to make the right judgement about him maybe not.
5. Believing references: Now the person giving the referral is far more
concerned to maintain his relation with the person whose reference
he is than actually letting the right information about him out.
Executives thus fall into a trap by believing a stranger for a crucial
decision like hiring.
6. Just like me bias: The interviewer is highly biased towards a candidate
who has similar credentials or habits than the person who does not. At
the end of the day the two parties might have to work with each other
and thus also try to judge each other’s likeability and thus the just like
me bias sets in and plays a huge role in shaping the person’s
judgement.
7. Delegation gaffes: Since the main executive who is responsible for
taking the final decision might not be involved in the decision leading
to the final most decision thus he misses out on a lot of decision
making power and the earlier work might have been carried out in a
sub-standard way by a group of ill equipped people.
8. Unstructured interviews: According to a analytics run on multiple
interviews over years and also research show that structured
interviews are undoubtedly the best way to judge the person and
hence must be given a lot of weightage.
9. Ignoring emotional intelligence: The five core qualities leading up to
emotional intelligence are motivation, empathy, self-awareness, self-
regulation, social skills now as you grow the career ladder these skills
start having paramount importance. And it is difficult to judge whether
 a person has EQ in the interview itself we thus also need to give
importance to judging the EQ of a person.
10.Political pressures: This is when the entire formal hiring process is
kipped and the decision is taken based on a past alliance for example:
the chairman hiring his college roommate as the new CEO.

Getting Hiring Right:

1. Define the problems you need to solve through hiring: Here in this
regards we need to clearly specify the current and future
requirements and then come up with a list of required competencies
in behavioural terms and then achieve everyone’s consent on the list.
2. Creatively generate a candidate list: You can contact people who have
referred a good number of quality candidates in the past this show
that he has the company's goodwill at the top of his head and not
personal gains also we might look at unconventional ways of hiring on
the basis of fit, salary etc. for example hiring an executive fired by
another company.
3. Methodically evaluate the candidates: Since research shows that
structured interviews produce much better results we must thus
resort to them, another way can be meet the references and see the
truth i what they have written and ask pointed questions to the
candidate after giving him an open situation.