Chances Are You Just Made a Bad Hire; What Next?
Fatigue, fear, grief and the resulting stress are causing compromised decision-making during hiring season for schools. Hiring managers are exhausted from the year and may not realize the degree to which their overtaxed limbic system has influenced their hiring decisions.
To be clear, a bad hire doesn't mean you hired a bad person. A bad hire is when we bring in someone who lacks the skills or competencies necessary to succeed in the workplace given the resources the organization has available to help that person meet performance standards. OR that the organization lacks the ability to create the environment that will support the employee. Any year this is a tricky navigation, as our biases (positive and negative) compromise the integrity and efficacy of the hiring process.
At their best, schools have robust and comprehensive systems and structures in place that are proven to bring in employees that ultimately help advance the mission, bring diversity of thought and representation to the organization, and are set up to succeed. Such schools track whether their hiring processes are yielding the intended results, have worked to remove and hold themselves accountable to inequitable hiring practices (which is different than tokenism in hiring), and have an accurate understanding of the organization’s capacity to support, train, and develop employees.
Most organizations struggle with some if not all of the above during a “normal” year. The COVID pandemic makes it all the more difficult because of the convergence of the following:
Compromised decision making: our overstimulated amygdala (part of our limbic system, the emotional epicenter of our brain) processing fear, grief, and uncertainty in this past year impairs access to our prefrontal cortex (the executive epicenter of our brain), shortens our time horizon (making it difficult to think through impact), and clouds our memory.
Increased turnover: the events of the past year have increased those on the market looking to switch institutions or advance in their career. More resignations and retirements are putting pressure on hiring managers during a busy time of year
Identity politics: institutions are eager to prove their commitment to equity and inclusion by hiring an increasingly diverse talent pool. While this is a moral imperative and true representation is what makes successful organizations, some are confusing representation and tokenism, failing to actually put time into recruiting qualified diverse candidate pools and setting candidates up for success through equitable hiring, onboarding, and supervision practices.
Spread-thinness: we are coining this term to capture the fatigue leaders are feeling as a result of increased volume of work, unrealistic expectations projected on them by their communities and themselves, and the brain employing short-term coping mechanisms in the long-term.
The above is a recipe for disaster when it comes to hiring. In our work with schools we have found leaders overlooking major issues with candidates in a desperate bid to just get through and ensure staffing for the coming year.
Some brave administrators we work with have bucked this trend by delaying hiring some positions, relaunching searches, and stepping back to reassess their community needs following the pandemic before making decisions. These leaders recognize the need to calibrate their approach to hiring based on their context. Even if a school's hiring processes were effective prior to the pandemic, hiring needs to look different when our brains are compromised. Consider the adage, “what got you to here will not get you to there”. Schools need to consider how much they shifted their process strategically given their context?
The long-term fallouts from poor hiring can decimate organizations following a crisis. Best case, the organization must refill the position again. Worst case, the organization pours countless resources into performance management, disciplinary issues, increased escalations/turn over, and lawsuits in a community that is already reeling from a traumatic year.
It is possible your hiring process was compromised this year if you engaged in any of the following behaviors:
Told yourself we “can make this work” or “we have to make this work; we don’t have other options”/worked hard to justify hiring a candidate.
When torn between two candidates, failed to authentically consider the possibility neither of them was a good fit and that it was a failed search.
Acknowledge it was a failed search but hired someone anyway because you could not imagine relaunching the whole process.
Overlooked pink or red flags in references. (Note: If you can’t remember the references, that may be a sign of how grief and/or fear impacts memory loss.)
Ignored warnings from panelists whom you brought into the process because of their trusted perspective.
Hired based on positive bias, e.g., something about the candidate made them an appealing recruit (experience, gender, race) while overlooking other considerations.
Failed to declare in advance the priority competencies for the job, use a hiring matrix, and/or have diverse representation in your hiring process.
If any of the above applies, and before panic sets in, we have good news. It is not too late for your organization to adjust your onboarding process and your supervision for all new employees to set up as many new hires as possible for success and mitigating the fallout of misplaced employees. This will have to look different from past years, however. The upcoming years will be a critical for a strategic recovery from COVID. Consider the following questions when designing your onboarding process:
How will you adjust your onboarding process given the past year and the needs of your community now?
What additional support do supervisors need to effectively supervise their new supervisees?
What are key indicators of success for your new hires? How will you know if they are performing? If they are struggling?
What are your plans for intervention if early on it becomes clear that you hired someone who is not qualified for their role?
Also…
How will you adjust your hiring for any other positions?
In addition to regular onboarding practices, consider these additional steps:
Be honest with them about the past year to manage their expectations and your own.
Check in early and often on how things are going.
Remember things like memory loss are still present for us as a symptom of grief.
Encourage and normalize asking lots of questions early on.
Create opportunities for reflection, connection, team-building, space for the community.
Convene department chairs for reflection on how support for new faculty is going.
Convene administrators for reflection on performance management.
Provide coaching support for administrators onboarding new people.
Provide supplementary training for employees specific to coming into an organization that is transitioning out of a crisis.
Block time in administrators calendars to ensure space for coaching and mentoring.
Consider hiring a part-time professional development coach on staff to support everyone transition.
We believe the most important thing organizations can do is connect employees' talents and passions with their organizational mission, empowering and uplifting them to give their gifts to the world. What can happen with poor hiring is employees are set up to fail and punished for their lack of skill when in fact it was the organization that did not set them up for success. This impacts employees' self-esteem in addition to the implications for their livelihood.
We have a responsibility to set employees up for success. However tired we may be from this past year, when we invest energy strategically, everyone benefits.
