Hiring & Firing – A Risky Business
About this Episode
Hiring the best applicant, Firing when performance is not satisfactory, Retaining good employees is required to be known to every owner running his business.
Hiring process involves, receipt of application with resume, verification of background, and interview for final selection. You have to look out for the right person having requisite skills, right experience and past performance.
For hiring the correct person it should be ensured that Job description is accurately explained, skills and abilities needed for the job have been indicated, and accurate description of the job is given in your advertisement.
After the interview you should draw out a brief profile of the candidate to assess if it meets your requirements.
As far as Firing candidate is concerned, an employee should not be fired just as a routine. There must be solid reasons to fire him. Some of the reasons for Firing can be
-Asking frequent leave on fake excuses -Using internet not related to his/her work -Coming constantly late to the office -Wasting time in the office -Violating Social media policy of the company -Use of Drugs/Alcohol etc. during office hours -Falsifying company’s records -Unethical behaviour to the subordinate
Constant Poor performance, etc. However, at the time of Firing try to ensure that the employee is least traumatized. The orders of Firing should be given face to face as far as possible. This reduces the grievance and feeling of hurt. The conversation at the time of firing should be as brief as possible.
Dangers of frequent firing – -Your trade secrets can be exposed -Cost will be involved in training new people -The possibility of some legal wranglings with the employees can be there -Compensation will be required to be paid
There can be various reasons to lay off like Decrease in production, Slow down in business, Other economic concerns, Need of downsizing the workforce, Mergers and buy off.
Leaving a job can be an emotional experience, however leaving by termination is always a negative emotion. We should try to have planned turnover instead of unplanned turnover.
What this session covered
This webinar, part of the institute's continuing series, examined the risks attached to recruitment and dismissal. A moderator, standing in for the institute's president, introduced two invited speakers — the first from an executive-search and recruitment-consulting background, the second a senior human-resources practitioner speaking from the United Kingdom — each of whom delivered a prepared presentation before a question-and-answer session. The president joined later and offered closing observations and several questions of his own.
The first speaker argued that hiring is inherently high-risk because, unlike the sale of a product or service, it deals with individuals, and that selection combines measurable parameters with intuition. He identified several weaknesses in conventional practice: job descriptions that specify what an organisation wants but not what it will not accept; a tendency to let promising candidates slip because they do not match preset criteria; assessment tools he considered better suited to development than to selection; reference checks reduced to a formality rather than testing fitness for the new role; and salary structures tied to levels and previous pay rather than to a candidate's value. He suggested moving talent acquisition out of the HR function to report directly to the chief executive, treating it as a business rather than an administrative activity, and said his own firm hires for a defined set of attributes rather than for specific skills, on the view that skills can be taught. He linked dismissal largely to earlier hiring errors and observed that organisations often retain confirmed under-performers for too long.
The second speaker, who said she agreed that an HR leader must first understand the business, focused on the costs and risks of getting hiring and dismissal wrong. She distinguished the direct costs of a poor hire — which she said studies place at least at one third of the employee's first-year earnings — from the larger indirect costs to morale, engagement and employer reputation, noting that supervisors may spend about 30 per cent of their time managing a poor hire. She recommended auditing and process-mapping the recruitment process, checking whether selection over-weights technical skills and credentials at the expense of cultural fit, potential and attitude, training interviewers to recognise unconscious bias, and making fuller use of exit interviews. On dismissal — which she preferred to frame as termination — she set out the situations in which it may be warranted and the associated security, legal, reputational and retaliation risks, illustrating the reputational exposure with references to employment disputes. In the discussion that followed, the president drew on advisory experience to argue that the working environment into which staff are placed can matter as much as the quality of the initial selection, and questions from the moderator and participants explored how to judge whether a candidate suits a role and how to manage friction between established and newly hired staff.
Key points raised
- Hiring was framed as inherently high-risk because it involves people rather than inert products, and as a combination of measurable criteria and judgement.
- One speaker identified recurring weaknesses in conventional recruitment: job descriptions, over-rigid matching to preset criteria, assessment tools, reference checks and level-based pay.
- A proposal was put forward to move talent acquisition out of HR to report to the chief executive, and to hire for attributes rather than specific skills.
- The other speaker set out the direct and indirect costs of poor hiring and stressed auditing the recruitment process, unconscious-bias training and exit interviews.
- On dismissal, the discussion covered security, legal, reputational and retaliation risks and the value of thorough documentation and prompt decisions.
- The president argued that the environment into which staff are placed can matter as much as the selection process itself.
