7 Early Signs You Hired the Wrong Staff

The essence of hiring is to increase business profitability by strengthening the people process and maximizing productivity. However, the process of hiring can be more complex than it sounds. After a long, excruciating, and big-budget recruitment exercise, many managers still end up with the wrong people in the right places. This undermines the very goal of the recruitment plan.  

How does a business leader identify bad recruits early enough to mitigate the potential risk it might pose to the business?

The following are 7 early signs you hired the wrong staff.

Customers complain about him

Customers interact with your employees both formally and informally without your watchful eyes and are most likely to have some privileged view of your employees. If their experience with your employee is great it will manifest in their hunger for a deeper and stronger relationship with your business. But if the experience is bad it will lead to a series of complaints and ultimately to a drop in the sales numbers.   When your customers constantly complain about your new staff, it may be an indication that the employee is a bad hire and may be endangering your relationship with the customers if not taken care of.

He can't work with other team members

One of the signs of a healthy team is the bond that exists among them. They may disagree on ideas and the terms work but it doesn't damage their unity of purpose. If your new employee is constantly creating issues within the team that are undermining the attitude of other team members towards the achievement of group goals then you can be certain you have the wrong person aboard the ship. Your organization will pay a heavy price if nothing is done about the new employee. 

Misses deadlines

There's nothing typically wrong with occasionally missing deadlines. It only goes to prove that we are human. But when your new hire is in the habit of missing critical deadlines it is a pointer that you have the wrong person in the right place.   Lateness in the completion of his own risk or inability to meet his side of the bargain in group assignments are all signs that you missed your hiring objective. A bad candidate will slow down work and demoralize other team members if he is not taken out of the organization.

Unable to adapt to organizational culture

One of the modern-day core competencies demanded from employees globally is the ability to adapt. It is about being able to strategically fit into a new culture or new way of doing the same old things without losing your authenticity. If your new hire demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that he is unable to adapt to your organization's culture after a reasonable space of time then he is a bad recruit. 

Unteachable

A new hire who constantly puts up an I- know-it-all attitude. Not willing to listen to other people's views and insisting on having his way against the reality on the ground is a clear confirmation that you missed it on hiring. Unteachable employees are toxic people. Their attitude to work is capable of steering up huge bile and tension that may put the entire organization at risk of imploding. 

He is a distraction to others

When a new hire conducts himself in a manner that hinders or slows down the pace or progress of work by constantly creating diversionary circumstances in the team, is clearly announcing to you that the new employee's presence in the team is counterproductive. By continually keeping him you may be extending his bad traits to other team members.  Bad habits are easy to learn. Such habits, if entertained, could spread to other parts of the organization until the culture of mediocrity is fully entrenched in the organization. 

He demarkets the organization

A new employee who is always in the habit of putting the organization or management in a bad light is a bad staff. Someone who is always finding something negative to share about the organization or his colleagues to customers and other stakeholders is a threat to the organization's future. He will set stakeholders on a collision course with his tongue.  He will ruin his team, and run the entire organization aground with his carelessness and demeaning tendencies. 

In conclusion, a wrong staff in an organization is like cancer, the more you leave it unattended to, the more it spreads and eventually makes a victim of the host. Once you can identify and confirm a new employee as the wrong person, the next thing to do is not to tolerate mediocrity by getting sentimental, it is to disengage the staff immediately to save the entire organization from sliding into crisis.