Top 10 Hiring Mistakes

Wisdom from one of the most beloved practitioners and teachers at Stanford Business School

Nothing is more important than hiring. Nothing.

Who you decide to hire impacts every part of your organization: from its values and vision to its ability to innovate, adapt and survive.

You can't hire great people if you're just filling positions on a piece of paper. People aren't interchangeable cogs in a machine. The wrong people don't fit at all, and just end up gumming up the works. But the right person brings a special kind of harmony to the way things run -- she'll come up with all kinds of new ideas and invent brilliant ways to improve the business. Like a good investment, these people pay off far more than anyone expects.

But also like a good investment, finding a great person takes diligence, care and often time. It means locating the best candidates, interviewing them carefully, doing in-depth reference checking, and coaching them well once they're on board.

In the coming days, I'll post ten of the most common -- and most critical -- mistakes that hiring managers make. Here's the first one:

Don't fall into the trap of selecting candidates who look and act like you do. Many new CEOs I know are too easily impressed by candidates who went to the same business school as they did, or worked at a company they worked at, or grew up in the same part of the U.S.

There's plenty of research to show that we evaluate people more positively when we feel they're more like us. Similarities in experience, attitude, political views, and physical appearance all increase the likelihood that people will "connect" -- even if those similarities are hiding weaknesses that make the person ill-suited for the job.

From the factory floor to the executive suite, no manager is immune from feeling comfortable with the familiar. For one thing, we tend to like people who affirm our opinions and decisions. And we tend to be able to communicate more easily with people who share our background, language, and belief system. Better communication means fewer conflicts, and if we feel like we're going to get along with one hire better than the other, that's a hard impulse to ignore.

But ignore it you should. At the worst, an unchecked tendency to hire people just like you can be discriminatory; if it means you're excluding people because they're different, that can spell legal trouble.

More important, building a homogeneous organization is just bad business. You won't have the variety of perspectives, backgrounds, and skills that are invaluable when you're up against big problems, or facing big opportunities.

You want to work with a group of people who challenge each others' perspectives, and push each other beyond perceived limitations. The value of a great hire becomes clear when people on your team are forced out of their comfort zone by an infusion of new ideas. That's when the world begins to look a little different.

If you want to make a great hire, do yourself a favor: don't fall in love with the first person who seems like a halfway decent fit.

Does the following situation sound familiar? You're in a bind, and until you fill a certain position, you can't take on additional work, move a project forward, or grow your business. You just want to get somebody in the door so you can move on to the "real work" -- and the person sitting in front of you seems to fit the bill just fine.

Too often, managers under pressure settle for the "fast-food hire". When you're famished, the lines at that healthy salad joint always seem so long, but a burger, shake and fries are right around the corner. You figure you can work off the pounds -- or deal with the stomachache -- later.

But making important decisions when you're desperate doesn't generally work out well. If you wait until you absolutely have to hire someone to create a new position, you've probably waited too long.

In a crunch, inexperienced managers figure that hiring people who are "good enough" is their best option -- and waiting to find exceptional people is a luxury they can't afford. The problem with this approach? Once you go down that path, you'll see that "good enough" begins to seem like an acceptable standard. You'll start to believe that candidates you see in the first week of interviewing are representative of the whole population. You'll never know how many needles might've been in that haystack, since you didn't bother to roll up your sleeves to look.

Early in my real estate career, I shared an administrative assistant with another partner. At the time, my duties were expanding, the phone was ringing off the hook, and paper was piling up on my desk. I was getting desperate -- so I decided to make a hire, something I'd never done before.

The first person I interviewed was a former Army machine gun instructor -- discipline written all over her. "Perfect," I thought. I hired her on the spot. Indeed, the paper pile shrank and my phone stopped ringing. But it didn't take long for me to realize that she was taking her duties so seriously that she wasn't letting anyone through to me. I'd become impossible to reach.

The next time I did it right: It took two months to find a great match, but the extra time I spent paid off. She was with me for a decade.

That early mistake helped me realize that it's worth taking the time, thought, and care to hire the right way: to interview a broad range of quality candidates, consider a number of criteria, and think about how each would fit in the long term.

Like scarfing a burger, making desperate hires can end up leaving you with long-lasting heartburn. When you have the wrong people, client relationships get damaged, bad decisions get made, and existing employees are forced to spend valuable time picking up the slack.

So next time you're sitting across from a candidate who seems "good enough", ask yourself what "great" would look like. More likely than not, you'll have to digest the fact that you've still got some work to do.

Up next: Hiring the Resume, Not the Person

Hiring someone because they have an impressive resume is like buying a car because you love the brochure. If you fail to look under the hood, buyer beware. Your new hire may end up like the Fisker Karma: the coveted hybrid sports car looked like a million bucks, but was so ridden with glitches that the manufacturer had to halt production and start looking for bankruptcy protection.

You need to avoid lemons when you're hiring too. That means treating the resume like an advertisement - good for basic information but not the whole story.

A candidate's education, skillset and experience will be the first things to catch your eye. And, of course, it does matter who the person has worked for, which technologies she knows, and how many people she's managed.

But what you're really looking for in a great hire are the qualities you can't list on a resume - I call these brains and heart. They're at the root of a person's ability to confront unexpected challenges, to demonstrate wisdom and judgment, and to develop into an invaluable part of your team.

Brains are more than a person's raw mental horsepower. This kind of intelligence means having a flexible mindset that combines book smarts and street smarts. The blend enables a person to navigate unfamiliar situations, and to make sense of many conflicting signals. (See Carol Dweck's book, for a description of a "growth mindset"). Can this person tell a good risk from a bad one? Can he absorb knowledge fast, and apply it in real time? Does he have the social intelligence to work well with people around him?

Heart is my shorthand for the entire constellation of a candidate's values. It's the system of ethics and beliefs from which all her choices and actions arise. Does she dive into whatever she's working on? Can she deal with tough setbacks? Take responsibility and share credit? Can she make things happen at critical moments, even if she's tired?

When you find a top-quality hire, you'll see that the answer to these questions is inevitably yes.

Still, when deadlines loom, there's a temptation to snap up a skilled person who can help get your current product out the door. Just be wary about striking a Faustian bargain: you may be trading that short-term fix for a long-term disappointment.

Conducting a thorough and insight-capturing interview is one of the best ways to get a deeper sense of a person's character and mindset. I'll write about some interview do's and don'ts in the next Hiring Mistakes post: Interviewing on Autopilot.

When you're hiring, think of yourself as an investigator, digging for the truth. You're conducting a fact-finding mission aimed at discovering what the person is all about, what he can bring to your organization in the long term, and whether there are any hidden red flags. But like any good investigation, the process takes coordination, planning and time.

Unfortunately, managers often hire in a rush. They're "too busy sawing to sharpen the saw," as Stephen Covey used to say. Focused, in-depth interviewing begins to take a back seat to the quick and dirty kind. Thus, we tend to rush candidates around the office to meet people, leaving each interviewer armed solely with a resume he was handed that morning. The interviewing team often has no clear strategy for what each is trying to discover, and without a plan, they're likely to cruise through the conversations on autopilot, asking predictable questions and getting canned answers: Where do you see yourself in five years? Which project have you enjoyed working on most? What do you see as your main strengths and weaknesses?

The results are vague, redundant and unenlightening - hardly what you'd need to make a well-informed choice about whether to welcome someone into your organization. If you're too busy to make sure you're bringing on great people, you'll find you're even busier later when you don't have enough of them to help you make things happen.

So don't hurry the process. Come up with a plan that helps each interviewer cover a different aspect of the candidate's history and attitudes. Make sure interviewers get a chance to see the candidate in a number of different settings. And remember that it can be difficult to get beyond a superficial level in a half hour. If you have to go ninety minutes or even two hours to get a deeper sense of your candidate, you'll be happy you did six months down the road.

During the interview, listen carefully to the questions the candidate asks. What is this person looking to get out of the job? What are her concerns? What does "winning" look like for her? You can't make a great hire unless the candidate makes a great decision, too.

Ask the candidate what his prior supervisors will tell you when you call. The specter of reference checks (detailed in the next post) not only keeps interviewees honest, but it also gives you insight into how self-aware they are.

When you're done, pull the interviewing team together right away to compare notes: insights are freshest on the same day.

Good detectives, lawyers and journalists all take their preparation seriously, and when the time comes for questioning, they know what to ask. If you want to get to the truth of whether your candidate is a great hire, you'll need to do the same: switch off autopilot and take control of the interview process.

Even if you've followed all the hiring advice we've covered so far in this series, there's another critical step before you make an offer: You've got to talk to the people who've actually worked with the candidate.

Cutting corners when it comes to checking references is flirting with disaster. Sound obvious? You'd be surprised how many executives treat reference checking lightly, or skip it altogether. Reference calls are not a "check the box" hiring chore to get quickly off your list.

Take them seriously and do them yourself, rather than delegating to HR or an assistant. (You can get help verifying references' positions, histories and employment dates, if you need to.) What a person has done in the past, and the type of character and heart they have, are the best predictors of what they'll do in the future - and the people that have worked with them can give you the clearest picture of these qualities, if you ask the right questions.

Here are some best practices to consider:

• Don't call references out of the blue. Arrange for interviews at a convenient time; and thank them in advance for their help.
• Be as friendly as possible on the calls, and let the person know the conversation will remain confidential.
• Have some standard questions, but make sure the conversation is open-ended - you are, after all, trying to get the reference to open up. (That said, don't ask questions about, or make comments on, the candidate's personal life.)
• Employ a 'grain of salt' mentality when you're calling references the candidate provided. These 'primary references' will nearly always give the candidate a good review. Still, they can provide insight into her tendencies: Does she like working independently or on a team? With lots of feedback or without much supervision?
• Don't stop with primary references. Get a second set of references from the first references; and if you need to, seek a third set from the second group. You can do this by asking a supervisor to suggest a colleague with whom your candidate worked closely. And that colleague may suggest another colleague. The further you get from the candidate's "A-team" of references, the more likely you are to pick up important details.
• When you interviewed the candidate, you asked him, "What will your last boss say when I call him?" Pay attention to how and whether the candidate's answers diverge from the boss's. That'll give you a sense of how in tune the person is with the ways others see him.
• While you want to figure out any deal-breakers your candidate may not have revealed, avoid sounding like a mistrustful interrogator, fishing for "problem areas," "issues" and "past conflicts." There are more elegant ways to ask this question - like "Can you give an example of a thorny situation he's been in recently, and how he dealt with it?"
• Learn to identify the warning signs that references will give you. That can mean people who do nothing but confirm employment dates, those who damn with faint praise ("He was a pretty consistent worker"), or those who say things like "I wouldn't want to say anything negative" or "I shouldn't really comment on that."

Remember that what you're looking for are the less tangible aspects of a person's performance -- his ability to work well with others, his leadership style, or how well he works under pressure. Positively phrased questions like, "What is his biggest opportunity to improve?" can help get at shakier areas. "Is there anything else I should know when considering him for the job?" will give the reference an open-ended way to alert you to sensitive observations. The more natural the conversation, the more a reference is likely to share information.

You'll find that with great people, you can dig pretty far into their network and have a hard time finding colleagues that didn't like working with them, or who don't have a story about their determination or dependability. It's the opposite with candidates you want to avoid - you may only have to spend 20 minutes on the phone before you start thinking: "Next!"

Update: Thanks to readers for sharing concerns about contacting secondary references. Let me clarify that if you're going to look beyond the list of references the candidate gives you, you need to let him or her know in advance that you'll be doing so. That'll give him an opportunity to tell you which people or places he'd prefer you not contact, and why. If someone refuses to let me talk with anyone but a couple of pre-wired references, I might wonder if there's something deeper going on. And if the person drops out of the running rather than consent to my talking to a few more colleagues, he's likely not a great fit in the first place. Thanks again for reading.

Photo: jhorrocks / iStockphoto.com

We often picture the hiring process as a one-on-one kind of activity, with a manager facing the candidate across a table, and later making the final decision about who to bring on. But like nearly everything in business, you'll get far better results if you make hiring a team effort.

Your best people are an invaluable resource in deciding who to add to the team. They'll be able to see subtle things about a candidate that you missed, personality traits that you didn't register, and technical strengths or weaknesses that you don't understand. They'll be able to give you a collective gut read on whether the person would fit on the team, and they'll have ideas for how to define the candidate's position and responsibilities.

As a leader you don't have to agree with every impression, but having the opinions of the people you trust always helps you shape your own. On the other hand, if the team feels excluded from the hiring process, they may feel like you don't have confidence in their opinions. If your employees feel frozen out of the hiring process, they may feel resentful of the new hire, or even threatened by her. That type of toxic feeling can and will get in the way of the new hire's success, no matter how qualified the person is.

The guidance in this post works best if you've got a team of trusted people that you can rely on for objective opinions and intelligent analysis. If you don't have that kind of group, you may have to go back a step and work on developing a culture of cooperation and collective goal-setting -- the less ego the better. A good team knows that the more team players it has, the more "wins" everyone will earn.

Good people recognize good people: High-performing employees tend to want to work with people who enhance the team; they know that groups of productive, self-driven people help each other perform at the top level. It's in their interest to help you identify a great new hire, so take advantage. As I wrote in the post about interviewing, come up with a plan for which of your team members will cover which facet of the candidate's background and performance. Your best engineer can evaluate technical skills, your best communicator can form an impression of the person's people skills, and you can try to get at the deeper-seated qualities like "brains and heart."

Meet again after the interviews and compare notes: Are there any unanswered questions, uneasy impressions, or potential red flags? Or do you all agree that you've got a potential great hire on your hands?

Hiring as an exercise in trust building: When you invite your team into the hiring process, you're sending them a signal that you trust them, not just for their business sense, but for their judgment in people. The new hire will always be part of a team, so have the team think of each new hire as an investment you're all making together. If the hire turns out to be fantastic, everyone gets to reap the benefits of having found a valuable new person. If a flop, well, you all flop together. You'll all pick up the pieces and cover the bases while you look for the next candidate.

A hire that has the group behind it will have a better likelihood of success in part because the team will collectively want its new hire to work out. Most people will go out of their way to help make the hiring choice succeed, because they helped make it. In that way, you're also giving the new hire a better chance to find mentors and collaborators - powerful helping forces in getting new hires to their potential - and of energizing your veterans.

The value of team-based hiring is easy to see if you put yourself in the shoes of the new hire: You've already had meaningful conversations with many of the people you'll be working with - supervisors, colleagues and direct reports. If those people have agreed that they want you on board and are eager to work with you, you're half way home. With good feelings in the air before you even show up on your first day, you can feel confident that you took a job at the right place.

Photo: gosphotodesign / iStockphoto.com

When it's time to make a hire, you'll want to get good at knowing whether the best candidate already works for you - or if you have to go somewhere else to find her.

It's a delicate balance. You don't want to go outside for every important hire, nor do you want to confine yourself to internal candidates. Each approach has its advantages, but either can become a liability if you rely on it too much.

Outside hires can bring skills and experience that people on the home team just don't have. If you're looking to open an office in China, you need someone with experience doing business there; if there's no such person on your team, you'll have to hire one. If you're a brick and mortar retailer and you want to build your Internet sales channel, you may not have a person with the technical skills to make it happen.

Outside hires can bring new ideas and dazzling problem-solving approaches with them - and those infusions of creativity will often allow new perspectives to replace older ones. That's how a culture evolves.

But in the same way, hiring outside people can become habit-forming. The excitement about new insights they'll bring, and opportunities they'll see that others won't, can be seductive. Internal candidates can seem all too familiar: their shortcomings are well-known, their reputations are established; so why not take the risk and look for an outsider who could be your next superstar?

Beware of this siren song. You know your internal candidates, but you don't know the outside ones, and it's precisely what you don't know that can come back to bite you. You can fill some of the gaps with thorough interviews and reference checking, but not even the best hiring practices reveal every potential problem.

Promoting from the inside leaves less to chance. Your people are known quantities; you're aware of their character and capabilities. Moreover, advancing one of your team members lets the others know that you care about the upward mobility of your team. It'll show that your organization values professional development, and backs it up with real opportunities. That will help you keep your stars, and boost the chances that, when it does become necessary to bring in talent from outside, your people will be onboard with it.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the perils of hiring only people who are familiar to you. The same kind of mentality can lead to an allergy to outside candidates - they're people you don't know. But inside-only hiring can lead to insularity and stagnation in your organization. It can weaken your ability to stay agile and innovative. At worst, you'll fall out of touch with your customers and the market.

You might worry that bringing in outsiders can disturb your firm's culture and disrupt the way things are done. Maybe. But many cultures can benefit from a periodic shake-up. Sometimes that kind of jolt is just what your firm needs to leave behind old habits.

So when you're trying to decide whether to hire an internal or external candidate, interview both. The process itself can be helpful to all involved. For internal candidates who don't make the cut, it can be an opportunity to offer feedback and help them craft a plan to improve and advance. Likewise, if you decide to go with an insider, having talked to external candidates will give you insight into what's happening in other parts of the industry, and to meet candidates who may be a good fit for another position later.

In the long run, you'll want to strike a balance between keeping current employees engaged and excited, and bringing in fresh talent and perspective. As with many areas of business and life, there are two sides to every coin, and you'll want to be comfortable picking both heads and tails.

Photo: mast3r / iStockphoto.com

A successful hire doesn't end with a job offer and a handshake. "Welcome aboard" is just the beginning.

Even overachievers need support, direction and encouragement in their first 90 days, and HR training sessions and employee manuals won't cut it. It's up to you to help your new team member feel comfortable with her role and colleagues, or you might lose her. And that's a hiring mistake you don't want to make.

When I hire someone, I start by making the new employee's success an explicit personal goal. This might sound something like:

• I want the team to wonder how they got along before Mary joined.
• I want Mary to say, "I never thought I'd enjoy a job so much."
• I want to be excited about Mary's contribution to the organization's future.

The particulars of these goals can vary, of course. The point is to imagine what a "win" might be for Mary - and for you. Like any goal, you have to make it a reality by doing what it takes to get there, not just talking about it.

If you want to do "onboarding" right, I recommend the following approaches:

1) Everyone pitches in: Your team may need to be reminded to make an extra effort to be welcoming. Just as the human body can reject a transplanted organ, existing teams can be hostile to new members without the right groundwork. Getting your team involved in the hiring process is a good start; but don't stop there. Ask the team for thoughts about how to make the new person feel welcome, perhaps something that helped them in their early days on the job. Just reminding the team about first-day anxiety will communicate a level of care that can pay dividends.

2) Cut 'em some slack: A new hire can put herself under a tremendous amount of pressure to get results right away, the better to show the team what she's made of. Ask her not to go all out right away. Her first few months should be spent listening, observing, getting to know her teammates, and building trust. Tell her you know she'll do well - that's why you hired her. But for now, "job one" is to build trust and to learn from her new colleagues.

3) Get the feedback going: Ask your newcomer for permission to provide frank, real-time feedback (which doesn't mean you'll be breathing down her neck - it means you'll be there to offer help and suggestions.) Likewise, tell her that you'll want to hear her unvarnished perspective on the way you work - so the feedback goes both ways. In order to make the process more effective, bear in mind that the best feedback happens in real time. If you can catch someone in the moment, while the teaching opportunity is still fresh, it's better than calling her into your office for a performance summit days or weeks later. Just after a meeting, call or conversation, it should be no big deal to say, "I noticed a bit of tension when... I wonder if we might explore what you were thinking when... Or, tell me if I'm helping when I..."

4) Be clear: There should be no doubt about the new hire's roles, her reporting relationships, and, once acclimated, what she'll be expected to deliver. But remember that over the long haul, successful hires do far more than just "get work done". They do their jobs in a way that empowers others, builds the organization, reduces conflict and creates harmony. Remember, people are hired for what they can do, but get fired for how they go about it. Remind your new hires that the "how" can be more important than the what - and give them the coaching they need to understand what that means.

5) Values - show, don't tell: It's easy to rattle off a list of virtues when you're describing what your organization is all about. Companies love to talk about the importance of integrity, cooperation and social responsibility. But you're fooling yourself if you think you can teach your employees virtues by reading them from the handbook. Your organization's values come from where it spends its time, money, and energy. And perhaps more than that, how its people act, and the choices they make.

When it comes to deciding what to pay your new hires, you want to be right on the money.

Pay too little, and before long they'll become dissatisfied and resentful. As soon as a better opportunity comes along, they'll be gone.

Pay too much, and they'll be happy for a while. But if a big paycheck is their primary reward, they'll begin to feel they've traded away their freedom for financial security. Mortgages, car payments and school tuitions may lock them into jobs they can't stand, or no longer do well. They'll want to leave, but won't know how.

Organizations made up of people who chose their jobs based on the highest salaries are miserable places to work. They're often full of petty jealousies and politics, and hostile to new hires. I won't name any of the Wall Street firms who hire mainly with outrageous salary and bonus packages; but it's clear to those of us who use their services that something is wrong. The worst offenders have created monster organizations that eat people up, are hard to manage, and miss the top-quality candidates that aren't interested in the mistreatment. When firms are full of unhappy people who are just there for the money, everyone - management, colleagues, customers - pays the price.

Instead, your hiring goal should be to create an "all-volunteer" organization, where everyone is there because they want to be. Many of today's knowledge workers are flexible enough to migrate between jobs if they're feeling unappreciated or underpaid. Remember, your competitors are just around the corner: There will always be a rival willing to pay "above market" to hire away your best people.

That's why good leaders know that a good salary alone is never enough to keep people on board. You need to offer team members ways to find meaning in their jobs, to enjoy collaborating with colleagues, and to feel invested in the purpose of the organization.

A lot of well-compensated people put up with anguish at work, hoping it'll pay off outside the office, when they're "living life." That's a losing strategy in the long run. In our personal lives, most of us are looking for happiness, for understanding, for meaning and for camaraderie with people we like and respect. So why not create a workplace where all this is true, too?

It's not all about the money. Consider other kinds of compensation, like these, that can offer meaning, recognition and respect to those you hire:

1. Access and voice - If people don't have access to senior management, they chafe when their voices aren't heard. Most people don't insist on having their way all the time; they just want to know their way has been considered.
2. Titles - The best organizations I've worked with are relatively egalitarian when it comes to titles. At jetBlue, we're all crewmembers - from the CEO to the newest flight attendant.
3. Recognition - Formal recognition programs such as "employee of the month" or years-of-service awards are all fine; but they don't have as much impact as the casual nod at the beginning of a meeting to those who put in a great effort. Making it clear that credit will be given for great performance is a form of reward.
4. Learning - For many, meaning is intimately linked to growth, learning, and the discovery of their own potential. Don't be an organization that touts growth opportunities but doesn't back it up with time or money. Giving people a chance to cycle through different positions, to learn new skills and to experience new challenges are powerful forms of compensation.
5. Service - The things people sacrifice for are the things they love. Give them an opportunity to help their fellow workers, to give to a community fund, to do work projects, to deliver meals, or to work shoulder-to-shoulder to give back.

People who prefer money to these other kinds of compensation may be "hired guns," the kind who hang around right up until a better-paying gig comes along. But the people who thrive in an environment that prizes respect and opportunity are likely to stay, to be more invested in their work, and to create value for themselves and the organization - all things that money can't buy.

Like it or not, you're eventually going to make a bad hire. Even if you do everything right in the hiring process, you'll find that it still doesn't work out about a third of the time. So instead of beating yourself up about it, find a way the mistake

You'll usually know something's wrong in the first 90 days. The new person will be late completing projects, won't have the skills you might've thought, or won't seem to be putting in a lot of effort. But most of the time you'll find that the person just isn't the right fit. He doesn't really get along with - or "get" - the team. It's less what he does than how he does it.

The longer you keep the wrong person on, the worse the mistake becomes. Problems compound as the recruit's performance puts more demands on the people around him, and they start getting dragged down too.

So here are a few guidelines for extracting yourself - and your new recruit - from a mistaken hire:

1) It's not them, it's you: The most important thing to remember when you're preparing to let a new hire go is that you made the mistake, not them. You or your team probably should've caught the issue during the interview and reference checking process - or perhaps you blew the onboarding. In any case, don't take your mistake out on the new hire. You made the call - now you have to unmake it.

2) Do it fast: It's no fun realizing you made a hiring error and that it's up to you to deal with it. But once you know, you have to take action. If you let the error sit untouched long enough, it can grow into a full-blown personnel disaster. Bad mojo from the hire can spread like a disease - if things get bad enough, other team members can threaten to quit or projects can get derailed.

This isn't a regular firing situation, where you've tried to help a longer-term employee get back on track with feedback and coaching - or even deciding that the person can no longer keep up with a job they were once well-suited for.

This is a new hire. Because the person is not yet a functional part of your organization, you're doing him and yourself a favor if you take care of the problem before it goes too far.

3) Be human about it: Remember that the new hire is about to lose a job he just got, and may well be upset and embarrassed. Be gracious and gentle. Remind the person that, sometimes, good people are simply not the right fit for certain jobs, even if they're talented and hard-working. Your recruit will be better able to thrive in a job and environment that's more suited to him.

4) Help with the transition: Because this was your mistake, you should make sure the person has a soft landing when he leaves the position. If you can't find a job inside your organization, help find one outside, whether it's by offering to be a reference, arranging for introductions, or brainstorming ideas. Try to give enough severance to buy the person time to find a new job. And when it comes time to make the announcement, help craft a true but kind public reason for why he's moving on so quickly.

5) Offer parting feedback: If you simply show people the door without giving them any insight into the reasoning, they may not be better off at their next job. There are certain liability issues you need to be careful of when discussing performance, but if the person is open to it, you ought to be able to find a way to offer constructive feedback on how he can improve. Many people will want to hear how they can grow and do better, and opportunities for that kind of information are relatively rare. By the same token, you might also ask the person if they noticed any ways you or your organization can improve: it takes two to make a poor fit, and perhaps there's something you can do better in the future.

You'll never have a perfect batting average with hiring, but if you ignore your own mistakes and hope they go away, you'll be doing a major disservice both to your organization and to the person you've hired. Put yourself in his shoes: if your new boss was certain you weren't the right person for the job, would you want her to tell you, or to pretend everything was okay? It's always best to face our mistakes squarely, do our best to address them, and move forward.