One of the more common phrases bandied about in the business world is ‘hire slow, fire fast’, the strategy that one should select new employees with forensic caution and cut ties with non-performing ones as quickly as possible.Yet this compelling statement has become one of the most misunderstood hiring strategies globally. Regularly deployed out of context, it creates more harm than good, leading to a litany of disastrous HR processes and poor outcomes for the businesses involved.
Take ‘hiring slow’ for instance. I recently talked to a business owner operating in a remote part of Australia who was recruiting for a General Manager. He received an application from an ideal candidate and wanted to interview and offer that week. The recruitment company he was using warned against such impulsive behaviour, advising of the need to complete their comprehensive one-month process of more interviews, psych evaluations and police and reference checks. They didn’t want to make a mistake.
‘They were the professionals,’ the owner told me, ‘So I agreed to their process.’ When these same professionals offered that perfect candidate the job four weeks later, she had already started in the GM role for the owner’s major competitor.
As he discovered, good applicants are like great houses up for sale. They don’t stay on the market for long. Statistics show that the average period of availability for top candidates is ten days whilst the global average time to hire (from ad to employment) is forty-four days, including twenty-three days in the interviewing stage. The disconnect is blindingly obvious. And while many organisations say they struggle to attract great people, their biggest challenge is actually reinventing their process-driven systems that lead to the dropout before interview of top candidates who are available.
Similarly, when it comes to the ‘fire fast’ portion. No argument here; if you identify a bad hire early, pull the ejector lever as quick and compassionately as you can. No-one wants an explosion of underperformers within the workforce. But the ultimate question that is not being asked is: why does a business needs to embed a strategy of firing fast in the first place? What recruitment processes are in place that are leading to all these unsuitable recruits? Could it be, shock, horror, that you might be hiring so slowly that you are missing out on all the best people?
For me, when recruiting for great people, I think of fighter pilot Maverick in the movie, Top Gun heading for the fighter jet and saying, ‘I feel the need. The need for speed!’ He didn’t just lob up one day, jump in a flight suit and roar off. He spent ten thousand hours planning for the day he could hit the skies at speed. Similarly, for anyone recruiting, the better catchphrase would read:
‘Prepare slow, hire fast, fire rarely.’
The Time to Go Slow
The time to be absurdly selective in who you hire is not after the CVs swamp your inbox.Organisations should slow down in the pre-recruiting stage, spending days, weeks or longer, developing well-thought-out processes, preparing to strike when the recruitment process goes live. Some prep work might include defining the role profile, creating a benefits-led ad template, an attractive pitch including your company’s key attractors, a timely and effective candidate screening method, and an inspiring interview process.
The ad is a great example. To me, the ad is a short story, a synopsis, the key first contact that will dictate the quality of the applicants who apply. Yet too often, I see managers knock up a recruitment ad the day before its release, filling the space with generic cliches such as ‘people are our greatest asset.’ A company that will spend weeks preparing a product marketing campaign will often prioritise only a few hours to their critical people mission.
When To Hit Turbo
Putting detailed thought into these kinds of practices is the fundamental meaning of ‘hire slow’, enabling recruiters to act with decisive speed in the period from advertising to job offer, where swiftness is vital to attracting the best people.
When I helped set up Flight Centre in the UK, the company was an unknown, competing against 800-store travel agency chains for great applicants. I followed the company’s recruitment process, taking three weeks to arrange an interview, and struggled to employ a single decent recruit.
Like Top Gun’s Tom Cruise, it was the first time I felt the need for speed. After placing an ad the following week, I read every CV the day it arrived and immediately contacted the suitable candidates to book an interview. If they were good, I offered them a job within twenty-four hours. I worried that this might reek of desperation but on the contrary, people took it as a positive and I had my pick of the best applicants. In two weeks, I had recruited six people. Six good people!
One of the six, Chris, went on to become the company’s UK Managing Director. At a conference a few months later, he told me he had been offered another three jobs the week after he’d accepted my contract. I asked him if he had been offered all four jobs at the same time, which one would he have taken. Chris smiled sheepishly. ‘Not yours,’ he said.’ One of them was American Express!’
The diagram below shows how speed works by comparing two companies competing for the same new recruits. Company A, who is using speed as a conscious tool, offers suitable candidates a position before other companies have even interviewed, so gets all the good recruits. By the time Company B interviews the applicants, only the unsuitable ones are left. Company B’s only option is to choose the best of the rest, meaning it employs second-rate recruits and guarantees itself one of two things: high, future staff turnover and/or poorer individual results, beginning a cycle of self-destruction.
The Effect of Speed in Recruiting Suitable Applicants
When organisations insist there are no suitable candidates, it’s often because they have moved too slowly in the recruitment process, and the applicants have dropped out or moved on. Or the organisation’s interview process is so long and arduous that many applicants give up in disgust. While recruiters are running endless psychometric tests and background checks, the great hire is at the induction day of another company.
Ironically, executives often want to slow down the hiring process because of their poor recruitment systems. They say, ‘We need to take our time to make sure we get the right person’ and quote the adage ‘hire slow, fire fast’ but this is often because they have no tools prepared and ready to select the right person in any decisive objective manner.
Some Underlying Speed Principles:
- The most suitable applicants apply within the first five days of advertising – not always, but over 90% of the time.
- Interviewing applicants quickly gives them a positive dynamic first impression of the company, making them more likely to want to work for you.
- Good candidates are likely to take the early job offer, the one that exists, than wait to hear from one that may not.
- By offering a great candidate an offer before competing companies have even interviewed, an organisation can avoid bidding wars.
- Never make an offer immediately after interview as this leads to drop-outs. (You can ring the next morning.)
With research showing that 60% of all applicants quit the recruitment process because it is too long or arduous, there’s never been a better time to lose those excruciatingly slow bureaucratic HR practices. When it comes to hiring, time really is money, so if you are not interviewing and offering a job within 7-10 days you’re missing out on the best recruits.
Anyone else feel the need for speed?