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2/27/2017 |
Insights |
How To Avoid Hiring Those Difficult-To-Fire Employees |
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How To Avoid Hiring Those Difficult-To-Fire Employees by Catherine Iste Though terminations can be challenging, it is so much easier to fire a consistently poor performer than someone who is just a bad employee. Negative nellies, glory hounds and wimpy managers may not do anything wrong enough to have a bad performance review, so they end up staying around a lot longer than they should. In those cases, sometimes it is easier to avoid hiring these difficult-to-fire employees than it is to try to fire them. Negative nellies One toxic employee can have an amazingly negative impact on a company. Her team is directly impacted, which in turn can affect the whole organization. Fortunately, toxic employees are not usually spontaneously created; they often have those personality traits already. During the interview, ask the candidate to describe the type of work environment in which she thrives and to give an example. Then, ask her to describe the type of environment in which she feels stifled or less productive and to give an example. In both cases, ask for descriptions of her manager or teammate's style and examples of what it was she did or did not like. Has she ever worked in a job in which she did thrive? Is it difficult for her to describe the ideal work environment? Or does she describe an unrealistic environment? Listen carefully for how her answers to questions like this compare to the environment in your office. Glory hounds Employees who take credit for successes and good ideas — whether it is deserved or not — are also a drain on the work environment. Like toxic employees, manager often hesitate to fire glory hounds because it seems like they have done nothing wrong. And if the glory hound does deserve credit — even 1 out of 10 times — it becomes even more challenging to fire him. Again, few of these credit grabbers develop that skill in the moment. To avoid hiring a glory hound, listen for the overuse of I and me instead of we or the team, when discussing successes. Further, ask the candidate to explain a process you know well and pay attention to whether he exaggerates the difficulty of or complicates the explanation of the process. As noted in this Inc.com article, glory hounds tend to think quite highly of themselves and go through extra effort to make themselves look smart. Read full article on MultiBriefs.
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