Three hiring mistakes that wreck your team (and what to do instead)

Let’s face it, the funniest thing about a two-weeks notice is that it is not a two-weeks notice. It’s like a two-minutes notice that once I told you I’m leaving, I’m kind of checked out. So picture this, you have a team member and they give their two-weeks notice, and you know this starts the clock on having to find the replacement. So you put together a job description, you post it online, you get a few inquiries, and you start having interviews.

In the meantime, you have other team members meet with the folks and you try to assess culture fit, and you narrow down to someone that you feel like is going to be a fit. So they get started and immediately, immediately, you get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that this person is not a fit, right? They said some things in the interview like that sounded a lot better than how they really show up.

They weren’t as skilled as they were in this area. They weren’t as comfortable with maybe sales or speaking or one of these responsibilities that they really sold themselves as. And now, you have this person and you’re thinking to yourself, what did I do wrong? What did I not see? And the biggest question you’re asking yourself is, how do I hire well for my team? I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the new manager playbook, where every week I share tips, tools, and strategies to make managing your team the easiest part of your job.

Because dealing with people is hard enough. And there is nothing harder and more costly than the whole act of hiring people, especially when you’re in that scramble. Because really, when a team member leaves and you have a gap to fill, they are pretty much gone the moment they give notice. We’ve all been there. We’ve had team members that have really, really stuck through it to the end. And we love those people, but it is the exception, not the rule.

When you have a rule to fill, you’ve got to move fast. But a lot of the times, we try to move too fast and we make mistakes that lead us to hire someone that is way worse than whatever we had before. Someone that brings the kind of culture down the team, that brings the output and the productivity down your team. And you’re left asking that question, like, how do I hire well? Right? How do I hire well?

How do I not screw up my team with a new hire? How do I guarantee that the next hire is going to work out? I get asked that question all the time. But let’s face it, you can’t guarantee anything with hiring because we’re dealing with people and we have no idea. But we can sure safeguard it. And that’s what I’m going to talk about later on the show, how to hire well. So you’re not going to want to miss that.

But I want to start by first talking about where we go wrong and the cost of getting it wrong. So where we go wrong, I think there’s a few things that I see every single day. First is just moving too fast. Now, fortunately, in the moments where I was hiring full-time team members back in the corporate world, I was in companies that at the time really required you to go slowly. So I developed a habit with that and it ended up working out so much better.

So if you’re wondering, okay, well, how do I safeguard it? Well, it means not going too fast. And where we can often go wrong is saying, I got to get someone in this chair. Getting anyone is better than the no one I have now. I’m underwater. I’m spread too thin. And it’s literally always worse. I have a client that works in a design agency and she was kind of the CEO of that department. And she needed someone to ramp up really, really quickly on social media because all of this content creation was falling on different team members that weren’t really covering it.

And some of it was falling on her plate. So she said, I just got to get someone in that seat. And she hired someone. And immediately, it caused so much more stress than using an outside agency or a vendor because the person wasn’t a fit. They weren’t skilled. And when she brought this challenge to me, she said, my gut said it wasn’t the right fit, but I was so underwater and I didn’t know what to do.

And I said, I get it, but let’s talk about what the cost of that is. And what it meant was she had to spell out every single detail of the work, writing up decks and docks and SOPs, not just to onboard someone, but every single week repeating it over and over and over. When the person would hand in work content, different samples, it was always wrong. There was spelling mistakes. There were things that are outside of the template.

They weren’t bringing creative ideas. It was big misses. And the person just wasn’t a fit. They were not good at this role. They might be good at other things, but this was not a fit. And it caused her so many headaches because now she had this team member that she was a nice person that wanted to do good work, but just did not cut it. And the lesson that this client learned was, gosh, if I had took a little bit longer, I wouldn’t be in this situation.

And she regretted that so, so bad. I think moving too fast because we think anybody is better than no one, it is so short-sighted. Really? Anyone is better than no one? I don’t think so. Anyone is not better than no one. The wrong person is not better than no one. Bottom line, let that sink in. The wrong person is way, way worse than having no one because the wrong person will slow you down. And if it’s not just you getting pulled in the weeds as the manager or the business owner, the leader, it’s everybody else on the team.

Because one other thing that the wrong person will do, it will alienate the high performers. High performers don’t want to be on a team where they got to pull all the weight. And I have been there way more than one time where I look around on a team when I was in the corporate world and I was the 10X-er looking like, I’m not going to do seven people’s jobs. I don’t want to do two people’s jobs.

I was already crushing it myself. Why should I have to do other people’s jobs? Because the manager didn’t hire the right person. So that breeds discontent, disengagement. Your high performers, they start looking for the exits. I have been there. I have been one of the levers because of this. And I made a commitment to myself that I will slow down so that I can find the right people. Because if I create other high performers wanting to leave, then that’s on me.

So going too fast is the biggest mistake we can make. The second mistake that we can make is, well, underpaying someone so much that they realize that, right? I mean, I understand there’s a range. But when I talk to people about paying their employees, and you’ve heard me talk about this show, I always ask, would you do a good job for this price? Would you do a good job if you were getting paid this? Would you want to stay?

Because even if you’re going to be there a little while, if you know you are being underpaid or you’re at the low end, you’re always got your eye out for the next better thing. I had a client that brought in someone that was kind of like an office manager. And so she said, well, this person’s new at this kind of role. I’m going to bring them in at kind of like around the minimum wage for the salary, not hourly, but like for whatever the W-2 salary could be.

And I said, yeah, I don’t know. You’re based in California. It’s an expensive place to live. I worry that if you bring someone in and you take all this time to hire them that they might be kind of like not sticking around. She said, yeah, I get it, but I don’t have budget for that. So she said, okay, let’s see. So she brought in someone, brought the person in the low end range. Now the person was really, really good.

This person could like had maybe five, six years of experience. They didn’t have the office management, but they had really strong administrative and some creative skills. And when they joined, they immediately started crushing it. The other problem was they immediately realized that they were being underpaid and they immediately started looking for a new job. And this new hire stayed with this client for two months and then said, hey, I love the environment, but I can’t afford to stay here.

And she lost that awesome performer. And this business owner had to start this process again. She had to start looking again for a new person, which costs her so much money, so much time. I think it took her about four months to find someone after that. So all that lost productivity was way, way more in time and money than her making up that difference. So let’s say, I don’t remember what it was, but let’s say she paid that person 70K a year.

If she had paid that person 80K, right? Not crazy more, 80, 85. That difference would have been less than she wasted in having to do a lot of the stuff herself, hiring freelancer after freelancer to figure this out until she found that new hire. That is the cost of underpaying people. It always bites the slater. So that’s why I’m such a proponent of this, right? I’m really thinking about this because when people are underpaid, they know it.

Now, I’m not saying hiring someone that’s fresh out of college and giving them $200,000 for entry-level task. No, I’m talking about really looking at what would the difference be of an additional, I don’t know, five, 10%, where you can fit that in, and then see what you can do there. Now, the other thing I see people do wrong is they hire folks that are really, really good at this skill, but they are an asshole. The no-asshole rule used to be something that people would talk about in teams.

Now, it’s coming back up. Eric Schmidt talked about it recently. You should hire divas. Steve Jobs was a diva. It’s the right way to get innovation and creativity. Let’s be honest. The next person you’re hiring on your team is probably not the next Steve Jobs. So if you hire someone that’s just kind of a dick, you are going to tank the productivity of your team. The one person that is super, super skilled, but is not able to collaborate, that is not able to be a partner, that’s pissing everybody off, that’s mean to people, what we act like, they have some skill that no one else in the universe has that makes them have such an inflated ego that their behavior actually gets worse.

And we’re creating this story, this very, very false story that this person is the only person in the universe that can do this. I see this happen with creative roles all of the time. I worked in design for many years. I worked in design at Apple, at Microsoft, at Google. I worked in design in small businesses, in branding agencies. And the biggest mistake was saying, oh, well, this person is so good at this one thing. I know they’re not really easy to work with, but it’s worth it.

It’s not worth it. Because that one diva, they cost the productivity of everyone around them, because everyone’s stepping on eggshells. That means feedback isn’t flowing freely. There’s no psychological safety. So that means people aren’t comfortable disagreeing or asking questions or saying, hey, I don’t know if this is realistic. It just shuts down all dialogue on a team. And it costs you everyone else staying on the team. Would you rather have one diva and no one else?

No, because you probably have a team because you need more than one person doing the jobs, right? You need leads and supporting roles and cross-functional things. You don’t just need one person. And I think back to a team I was on back at Google and a design team. And there was one person that was really good at his creative vision. He was the creative director on the team. He had a great eye. And he was so mean to everyone else on the team that I think about 12 people left.

12 people. Was that one guy worth 12 people? The revolving door of finding designer after designer after designer 12 times for this one person. Well, you might ask yourself, well, if he was good enough, the result of that was because there was such tight turnover, deadlines were constantly missed, and the work that team was supposed to deliver didn’t end up getting shipped as a product. So the cost of that was not worth it. It wasn’t, okay?

And there are these situations, okay, fine, where you score the diamond in the rough, the unicorn, you got the next Steve Jobs, make that choice then. But we have to be discerning when we are hiring someone for a role, even if it’s a strategic role, even if it’s a key role, to not hire someone that’s really going to be challenging to work with others, because that person will cost you the rest of your team. Now, in the situation I was in, it wasn’t like that person was 50 times better skill-wise than everyone else.

No, this was Google. We had all highly, highly competent, talented people, okay? So this person was put on a pedestal so much higher when that wasn’t even the case. They all had the same experience. They all had the same background. This person was elevated, and it ended up crushing the team and sabotaged the team from delivering on this product. Not worth it, no. So these things, right, rushing through hiring because you’re so stressed, you’re so underwater, and you can’t deal with it, paying people too little because you just can’t squeeze another dollar, and hiring divas, these things that we don’t think a lot about, these are the reasons that your team members don’t work out or that other people leave.

And so when you ask me, how do I guarantee a hire will work out? How do I prevent high turnover? How do I hire well? It’s to not do those things. So what do we do instead? Well, we slow down. I mentioned in some of these companies that I worked on, they had required you to slow down. And it resulted, in my experience, when I had to hire folks, in having people that were the right candidate.

And that included posting a job and having it open for at least two weeks, not just trying to hire the first person that wrote to you. Having a pool of candidates, having interviews with at least five people, so that you can really assess having criteria for how you’re evaluating them. So it’s not just a gut feel. It’s not just like, oh, I got a good vibe for them. And in my book, The New Manager Playbook, I actually have this matrix where I say like how to kind of evaluate really unbiased and equitably everyone you’re talking to.

So you know you’re asking folks the same questions, you’re evaluating the same way. That allows you to both make sure that you are assessing people the same, but also get your team members involved. So that’s a worksheet I have within the book. When you grab the book, that’s going to be in there. And that kind of thing really ensured that when I brought someone on, I said, okay, I’ve done everything I can to really safeguard this and to make sure they’re going to be a good hire.

And fortunately, that was the case. The hires that I made, sometimes you inherit folks. The hires I made, I was very fortunate that they kicked ass, right? They were great. So that’s one of the things. We slow down, it’s going to change the game. Because two weeks, that’s not even that long. Let’s face it. You really can’t wait two weeks. Business owners listening, you might say, nope, I can’t. Okay, okay. Is there a freelancer? Is there a project-based person you can get while you’re making space to hire the full-timer?

Can someone start by doing a project and then it’s like a project-based to full-time, right? Maybe there’s some options there. If it’s full-time and you have, let’s say, you don’t have a lot of time, a backfill is going to get taken away and you have to move fast. Are there ways you can be thinking about this beforehand? Thinking about, okay, what makes a good hire? What’s a team fit? What are questions I want to ask people?

So that if you do have to move quickly, you can do that with ease and making kind of like a thoughtful process. So these are the ways we can do that. But the key here is, I’m not saying it takes six months to hire someone. I’m saying slowing down a little bit to get a better pool to make sure you actually know what you’re looking for. This isn’t that crazy, right? Second, pay people, right? I know we don’t have a lot of control over this in many situations, especially in the corporate world.

You’re given a salary ban, you’re given like, this is all you got. So that can be a challenge. Well, we’ve got to know that going in. If someone is feeling like they are taking a step backwards, I’m just going to tell you, even if they are willing to take the job, there is a high likelihood that that person is going to look for something else. Now, that doesn’t mean we say no to someone that wants that, but it’s a conversation around, hey, let’s talk about what you need to feel like if this is coming in under your number, what do we need to do for you to feel like this is really worth it for you?

I bet you no one ever asked that question, honestly. When I said that, I was like, shoot, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that question. If you said that, okay, so what would make this worth it for you to stay? And you could figure out with this person, okay, maybe it’s a year-end bonus based on performance or a profit share. Maybe it’s being able to go to conferences or travel. Maybe it’s able to become a manager or mentor.

Usually people have a whole slew of other things that they want that are not just the base salary. And if you have that conversation, you can figure that out so you can give that person enough value where it feels like, oh, yeah, base is like one little slice of this puzzle. I have all of these things that this company is really investing in me for, right? And then you create loyalty and you prevent that whole thing that I said about people looking for the next job because they feel undervalued just by having that conversation, just by asking that one question.

And then the third thing, it’s like, yeah, have a no-asshole rule on your team because one person, one single person that’s really good at their one thing, I just don’t believe that they are worth it. I don’t, sorry. I know that right now it’s like Meta or whatever is offering like a million dollars or 10 million, I don’t know, something for like AI engineers. And it’s like, that one person is going to save the world. I just like, I don’t agree with that.

Sorry, I don’t have to. I don’t think we bring in one person and that the only person in the whole world that can do this one thing and most of our cases and most of the people listening to this, like it’s just not the reality, okay? There are a lot of people that can do great work, that can be leaders, that can be strategic, especially if you’re coaching and developing them, especially if you have a great environment where people can thrive.

But the one diva, the one asshole is going to cost you the productivity of the rest. And so you got to know you’re making that choice when you bring someone on. And then when people, and if you don’t notice at first, okay, maybe someone doesn’t come forward as a diva or an asshole. When you start to hear, oh, this person’s really hard to work with, that’s on you as a leader and I can do another episode about this to take action, to give feedback, to really be working through the situation, to be showing, okay, I’m aware of it, I’m going to do something about it.

Because that’s actually what people are looking to you to do is if someone comes on their high horse, well, that’s phase one, what do you do about it as a leader in response? That’s on you. So when we prevent these hiring mistakes, this is all we can do to safeguard, right? This is how we create our own guarantee about how to hire well. But when we avoid these mistakes, we are so much more likely to get it right.

And then we can actually learn from it, right? We can say, okay, I went a little slower, I paid the right range, I made sure the person was really collaborative. What went wrong here? Sometimes someone’s just not going to be a fit. Sometimes the role changed and someone wasn’t really that adaptable, right? So that’s why in my work with teams, I work through, well, how do we want to make sure we really understand what we’re looking for?

And in my 90-day COO program with business owners, we actually figure out that hiring process very much in detail because hiring is the most expensive thing. And not having those seats filled, that is going to cost the business money every single day. And the biggest thing that I’ve learned from folks and that I’ve shared with folks is following these strategies, making a strategy for your hiring plan, and having the whole team understand what it is and being on board, this is going to safeguard the hiring.

So if you’ve struggled hiring in the past, you are going to want to have a strategy, reach out, hello at liagarbon.com, because having that mapped out, that is your insurance policy for having all of these issues. And it’s not just the three things we talked about today, those are the gotchas, but you want to have a solid strategy of what to do, what to look for, how do you understand really what success is going to be like for this person.

So you don’t have to figure that out alone. As always, if you have questions, topics you want to hear about on the show, email me. I love to do episodes that are listener requests, hello at liagarbon.com. See you next time.