Hire Slow, Fire Fast – A Hiring Process in Edmonton That Actually Works

Jen Garrison started as a client. She and her husband ran an electrical company and brought Bruce in to help with their first major hire, a journeyman. Her verdict on his hiring system at the time was that he was full of crap.

In this conversation she interviews him about it: what a bad hire actually costs, why gut feel is about five percent of the answer, and the process behind a ninety five percent hiring accuracy claim.

What a bad hire really costs

The number that never appears on your profit and loss

Bruce: Most business owners do not get hiring right. When they interview it is all about gut feel. This is a nice guy, a nice girl, I think they would work well on my team, I think they fit. That is a fine place to start and we never abandon it, because instinct matters. Unfortunately it is maybe five or ten percent of the equation.

Hiring is expensive, and the business community does not see it on the profit and loss statement. It is hidden.

Jen: Break it down. What does it actually cost, from entry level up to an executive?

Bruce: Base administrative costs run anywhere between seven and fourteen thousand dollars. Then there is lost opportunity, training and time, and that runs anywhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty percent of annual salary or compensation. For hourly employees, multiply by two thousand and eighty hours to get the annual figure.

And it is more critical for a small business to get this right than for a large corporation. When somebody leaves after six months or a year, the damage to a small business is enormous.

What normal hiring looks like

An hour of interview, almost no preparation

Bruce: Traditionally the interview is somewhere between twenty and ninety minutes. Entry level and mid positions average no more than an hour.

Preparation is minimal. We get the resume, if we are lucky, and some people do not even read them, because so many are doctored. If the experience looks right, we invite them in for thirty or sixty minutes. The interview is primarily about technical skills. Tell me where you have installed flooring. Tell me when you have built custom cabinetry. They answer, and everybody takes it at face value. A gentleman’s agreement. Then, how much are you expecting to be paid and when can you start.

That adds maybe another five percent of effectiveness. It is woefully inadequate, and it is why eighty percent or more of hiring attempts fail. That is all we put into it.

Why the extra time pays for itself

Retention, and babysitting the expert you just hired

Bruce: There are two reasons. The first is retention. We have become used to resumes with six months here and eight months there. Twenty five years ago, if it was not three or four years on average, you were a job hopper. We have accepted it. So we bring these people in and they use your business as a stepping stone. Given the size of the initial investment, that is deeply damaging.

The primary reason is the time and effort you then have to pour into the so-called expert you just hired. You are babysitting the person who was meant to take the load off your shoulders. How many times has the expert turned into a high maintenance project?

What makes somebody successful in one business does not make them successful in another. If that fit is not there you have performance issues, you jump in to coach, it usually does not work because you are far too busy, and then the double whammy: they leave after six months, after everything you put in. All of that is avoidable.

Start with the job, not the person

If the job could talk, what would it say it needs?

Bruce: We personify the job. If the job could talk, what would it say it needs for superior performance? You are looking for a person, yes, but the job exists to serve the organization, and a company is a system. If the job is one cog in that system, it has to be clearly defined.

So we build a job profile. It is similar to a job description but far more practical and field oriented. A job description is high level: duties, reason for the position, qualifications. A job profile complements and strengthens it.

In a workshop of no more than an hour we ask why this position exists, what the reasons are for the role, and how it serves the business. We extract key accountability statements. Then we do something unusual. We rank each accountability from most important to least important, and we assign a percentage of time to each one.

Why the time percentage matters

Russ, the sheet metal fabricator who quit after three weeks

Bruce: About ten years ago we were hiring a sheet metal fabrication technician for a construction company doing exterior housing products. The applicant, Russ, asked the hiring manager what the most important part of the job was. The answer was lift equipment, pallet jack, forklift. Russ got excited, produced all his credentials, and started a week later.

Three weeks in he resigned. It is not for me. I asked why. He said, you told me the most important part was lift equipment, and that is the reason I wanted the job. I said it still is. He said, but you told me it was only ten percent of my time. I expected to spend fifty or sixty percent of my day on it.

What is most important is not necessarily what you spend the most time doing. And the time spent in each accountability is how people are motivated. Ask Jen to sit in front of a computer doing data entry all day and she would rather be shot. Ask her to go and do business development and build people, and she will do it every day.

The profile covers more than technical skill

Behaviour, motivation, competency

Bruce: Out of the job profile you get an objective, quantifiable profile of the job. It is not only the technical requirements that we all obsess over in interviews. It covers what behaviours you want to see.

Managers get frustrated and say, this Bruce guy shows no sense of urgency, he just sits at the back doing his thing. That does not mean Bruce has no sense of urgency. It means that behaviourally it is not visible.

Then motivation. The job has to motivate in a way that makes the person want to show up and do it every day. And then competencies, skills, knowledge and aptitude.

Description, posting, and why people confuse them

A posting is a sales ad

Bruce: A job description is the high level document: duties, qualifications, experience. Useful when somebody starts, but it does not describe the day to day, and we are far too attached to it. Using it for hiring is the wrong way round.

A posting is advertising. It says why this role would be good for you. It is sales. So tell people why the job might suit them, and tell them the practical reality of it. Do not just list duties. Talk about your culture. Talk about why the job exists.

Owners tell me they get a ton of applicants and ninety percent are a waste of time. There is a reason. You put out a standard posting, so everybody and their auntie applies. A specific, engaging posting attracts the right people.

Jen: As a top talent person, I look for postings that look different. What are you doing that is not the same as everybody else? An A player can get a job anywhere, so they read it as a sales ad. You have to sell yourself to me, because I do not need you.

The process, step by step

Screen, profile, interview, then interview the reference

Bruce: Candidates come in from the posting. We phone screen, ten or fifteen minutes, not everybody. Indeed’s screener questions remove some. Reading the resume removes more. Then you call the top ten, and a specific screening technique tightens that to the top three or four.

Then we send a Person Profile assessment, and we compare the person against what the job profile said the job requires. Behaviours, motivation, competencies. The system shows where you will get far with this individual and where you will struggle.

The interview itself is informed by all of that work, and structured around it. We use thematic based interviewing. We look at the themes running through somebody’s decisions as they moved from job to job over the years, and when we see a theme we ask about it. It produces a great deal of information.

Then reference checks, and we interview the reference the way we interviewed the candidate. During the interview, when somebody makes a big claim, we ask for the first name of their supervisor at the time. Would Jill support what you have just said? Could we use her as a reference? An A player says sure, immediately. A B player is not sure she is still there. A C player would have to check whether she is around.

We do one or two references and only supervisors. We are not interested in peer reviews. Then we sit down with all those data points and lay out the options. That is where the ninety five percent comes from. It is a longer process, and it works.

Onboarding is not orientation

Recovering the cost of the most expensive asset you just bought

Bruce: Orientation is boxes ticked and forms filled in. Onboarding is different. The wind is in the new employee’s sails and it is the moment to get them engaged and productive as fast as possible.

If you have spent ten or twenty thousand dollars, the first thing you want as an owner is to reach break even and recover it. You recover it by making that new employee, who is an asset, productive. It is like buying a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar edge bander or CNC machine. You want production to recover the cost quickly. A person is the only growing capital asset you have in the business.

The one reason this system fails is when the hiring manager disengages after the hire. So we build a custom onboarding programme and stay with the hiring manager and the new employee for the next couple of months, at no extra charge, making sure the connection is there.

Jen: Employees do not leave jobs, they leave managers. They leave relationships. If who they interact with every day is stressful, they will not stay, because it drains them. It is not about the skill of the job.

Hire slow, fire fast

Bruce: Do not rush your hiring. It is expensive and damaging when it goes wrong. If you are a small business, take the time.

Fire fast means this. Hiring is not bulletproof, whatever the system, because it is still a social science. There will be bumps. When they come, do everything you can to support the employee and see whether you can make it work. Learn from the mistakes you made in hiring. You might keep that employee, and that is a real achievement for any leader.

But if it is not working, do not sit on it. I have watched a client sit on a hire that was not working, and they stayed, and stayed. The unnecessary damage to that business was not acceptable. Fire fast when you need to. Hire slow. The costs are incredible.