A hiring manager skipped steps to quickly hire someone from a major competitor who seemed perfect in interviews. On day one, the new hire took constant smoke breaks and texted constantly, revealing the mistake. The lesson: a rigorous hiring process filters out bad candidates.
Even a donkey can act like a thoroughbred for 3 interviews. This is a mistake I learned the hard way. I remember being about halfway through this guy's first day. He had talked a big game in the interview process. He came from one of our big national competitors, and I skipped a couple steps in our hiring process because this seat was on fire. I needed somebody in here to do the work immediately, and this dude was the dude. Well, about halfway through that first day, between the constant smoke breaks, the text messages coming and going all day, and just the utter disregard for anything happening in our office, I realized, crap, I've made a really expensive mistake. So moral of the story: follow your process. Make sure you're diligent in your hire— hiring process. Have a hiring process. And include multiple steps to weed out the donkeys and hire the A players.
