If the person who has the power to do that knows it, might as well fire them... why even bother? The person is politically-savvy generally savvy enough to smell it ahead and get promoted else where...
Because at the moment we are talking about, we yet don't know whether the new hire is a good programmer or not (he just passed the interview). Thus my point is to put new hires into positions where political savviness will be of no use until you are sure that he is indeed a good programmer, so that they don't have any option to fake anything by political means.