I realize that the title of this article:

1. Contradicts a legacy of hiring books with titles such as Hiring the Best and Stop Hiring Failures. Amazon has 17 pages of such while Barnes & Noble clocks in with 224 titles.
2. Potentially puts a gaggle of managerial consultants straight out of work.
3. Makes me look like the grim reaper of CEOs.

...but bear with. What I am about to say has been learned, on the job, in a 15 year career of hiring...and firing...the better part of 1,000 people. Ugh, that made me feel old. <!-- If what I write makes me look like the grim reaper of CEOs.-->

What I have learned is, despite all the cute tricks of the interviewing process (which I will blog about later and which only slightly improve your odds) your chances of hiring a great employee in a couple of interviews are about the same as your chances of getting a great spouse from a couple of dates. In other words, unless you're into the dowry thing, forget about it. Now, I realize that larger companies have longer interview cycles and a host of vetting mechanisms to winnow wheat from chaff. But in startups, where you hire fast and loose, you just can't get good results enough of the time.

Yes, long ago I accepted that hiring a new employee possessed a high variable of risk. I've had interview bombs turn out to be rock-stars, and interview stars never show up mentally for work.. My years of experience have taught me, as it relates to the hiring process, that you can’t presuppose anything. First judgments can be way off, and, while you shouldn't hire the guy that walks in one hour late, and didn’t notice a Cheerio stuck on his lip, anything else is fair game. It takes time to glean an employee's pithy attributes: work ethic, intelligence, attention to detail, enthusiasm, even personal hygiene. And lord do I have some stories on the hygiene front.

Thus, what I have come to is that the hiring process is not nearly as important as the firing process. By this I mean: your skill as a manager is not based on your ability to get good people into your group, but on getting bad people out. The sooner you cull weaker players, the sooner you can replace them with stronger players (for relatively the same salary) and improve the human composite of your firm.

Seems obvious, don't it?

Boy oh boy, it ain't. Managers just *hate* to fire people. They will endure a bad employee for months, even years, to avoid the pain of firing them and the headache of re-hiring the position. It amazes me to watch the capacity of the human spirit for suffering the lack of spirit in the ones that work for them.

Why managers hang on to sub-par players:

• They would rather have bad than none.
  Any intelligent boss will always let you replace bad with good.
• You have never fired and are scared of the process.
  Yeah, it sucks. But, get over it.
• They are too nice.
  Consider a career change. This is business.
• They have an overdeveloped belief in the value of institutional knowledge.
  Nature not nurture people! The very definition of an "A" player is someone who comes up to speed quickly. In fact, if you are too scared of losing institutional knowledge that might be a clue that you don't know what your people do and therefore are not that useful yourself.
• They aren't good enough to know who on their team is bad.
  Fire them.
• Stockholm syndrome.
  Break free. You can do it!
• Firing people ruins the culture.
  No, firing bad people improves the culture because it sets standards, and proves consequences.
  One bad apple does ruin the bunch.

What managers don't realize about the firing process:

• That employee was probably unhappy anyway.
  Most fired employees are actually miserable and trundling along just waiting for that push.
• A-players make you look better.
  And, they allow you to take a worry free vacation.
• Your team thinks you suck if you don't have the chutzpah to fire.
  You are not the only one that knows they suck. Earn their respect by making the tough call.
• You are hurting your own career by not becoming an effective firing manager
  This is a lose/lose for you:
  Best case: your boss doesn't notice the weak link, but does notice that your overall team isn't very effective. Worst case: they notice that you don't have the nerve to make the call and skip you at promotion time.

I leave you with this thought: in 15 years of firing, while I have *long* pre-labored over the pain of having to fire, I have *never not even once* come to work the day after a firing and regretted it. 99% of the time my feeling is: what the frick too me so long.

So, what's taking you so long?