Originally Posted By: rationull
Oh, and on topic, I feel your pain! We've been trying to hire for a long time (software engineering) and while we have come across some good ones some of them are just laughable. Getting good information from interviews is definitely a challenge.
I found the same thing. A couple of hires who presented among the best on interviews wound up being among my biggest regrets.
The bulk of my workforce worked for just above minimum wage. I had little latitude in wages as we were already being undercut everywhere by our major competitor, and paying more would have priced us out of business. Our clients, in turn, expected top notch performance not realizing they got what they paid for. I realized, in turn, that so did we.
My best employees were consistently retired boomers who worked to supplement their pensions and occupy their time. Meantime a couple boomers (not retired) were among my worst, making it pretty hard to pick a demographic that I could honestly say was the worst, as I encountered various issues with every age demographic.
I personally found references useless, as, excluding the exception mentioned above, potential employees will exclude employers who can say anything negative about them, while all potential employees can find a few people to put down as a reference who will talk them up.
Ultimately, no matter how carefully you screened the applicants, it was still hit or miss. The only upshot was that the screw ups and screw offs tended to do so early on, which made the termination process much simpler where here you can terminate within 90 days without giving cause to do so.
After 90 days it can become more of a mess, and we had one manager in particular, senior most that was subordinate to me, who we (as in myself, HR, and the company president) unanimously wanted to get rid of but were caught in a catch-22 as he had enough freedom in his position that nothing could be pinned down to him, and if we termed him without ironclad cause, we exposed ourselves to potential litigation. He was still there when I left the company.
-Spyder