[denvrede]

I would say you can generally (from my experience >95% of the time) identify a bad hire in roughly a month, mostly in two weeks and then give yourself / them additional two to be very sure.

We just hired for a management position a couple of month ago and I could tell from the very first meeting that it was a bad hire. I made sure with my team that I’m not totally wrong and then communicated my doubts to the C-Level. It took some time because they wanted to give them a real chance but just before the probation ended there was an evaluation meeting and the feedback was, without exception, negative. Took two days and they were gone.

Of course there will be hires that can uphold their charade for six month but I would say that’s an exception.

[ido]

If you can tell from the first meeting, why was this person even hired in the first place? The only time i experienced something like that was when the CEO hired someone without asking anyone else to vet them.

[dwarwick]

Some people are just good at interviews or talking themselves up.

Back in university, most of the students in my Chemistry course had A-Bs (grades were published publicly). The final for the course though was set up by some national body (in the US), and all but a few in the class got no higher than a D. Why? Because the national test was reflective of what students actually learned. The typical university multiple-choice test just self-selected good test takers. I myself got in the habit of only attending certain classes once a month because I knew how to game the tests and still walk away with an A-B average (e.g. have a good idea of what will be tested, know the material well enough that you can eliminate 50% of the false answers, and then make an educated guess on the rest.)

The same is true in hiring. It can be easily gamed if you don't have a great interview process (most companies don't). Even worse, part of that is by necessity. Each candidate has a different set of experiences, but the interview is made to be as routine and consistent as possible to weed out any potential biases (e.g. candidate given purposefully hard question or colored feedback because interviewer didn't like them). To truly vet a candidate, you would need situational questions and feedback, like they quickly glossed over some part of the question, so I'm going to go off-script and drill down into this area. Big companies especially run far away from that due to risk of discrimination lawsuits.

[denvrede]

You answered it yourself, no? The people who could vet them were not involved. And the reason doesn’t have to be malicious, it’s just that not everybody can be involved with every interview.