What percentage of your hires are keepers?

I'm curious for the people here who are actually involved in the hiring process, how many of the people you hire end up being keepers?  And how many turn out to be underperformers, incompetent, or just plain lazy?

As an adjunct to that, no interview process is perfect...so how do you eventually decide if someone needs to be let go and when do you decide that the line has been crossed?

Richard Kuo
Thursday, December 11, 2003

How many of you work for companies that are keepers?  How many turn out to have no conscience, are managerially incompetent, and expect you to work 85 hours a week for 2-3 months at a time?

Thursday, December 11, 2003

"How many turn out to have no conscience, are managerially incompetent, and expect you to work 85 hours a week for 2-3 months at a time?"

Ahhh...fond memories of Corel :)

jedidjab79
Thursday, December 11, 2003

Hires: I'd say it was about 50/50 so far as good/not, if we define the test as, "Would I hire that person again immediately, or would I want to interview others first?"  And at least 80/20 so far as the long run keep/fire answers go.  But the one time I hired a whole bunch of people, I did so in a massive hurry -- people who have time to think might do better.

Companies: My experience, speaking of places I've actually worked only, has been about 50/50 acceptable to completely unacceptable.  And greatness is still batting .000 so far.

Mikayla
Thursday, December 11, 2003

At Microsoft, I believe the ratio is 19 out of 20.

OneOfFortyThousand
Thursday, December 11, 2003

About 9/10 are ones where we would pick them again. But our hiring process is incredibly slow, we really discard a lot of people that I think we should have given a chance to and if we had more agility in staffing we wouldn't have to turn down jobs.

Nero
Thursday, December 11, 2003

Rumor has it that in some unfortunate organizations, "keeper" and "incompetent" are not mutually exclusive :-)

John C.
Thursday, December 11, 2003

I try before  buying, requiring that I worked with the person or someone in the company has and is willing to speak for them.  This keeps my number very high.

But... You said keep versus fire.  Perhaps the question should be, of the last 100 people you hired, how many of those would you identify as critical to put on a project that would keep the company in business?

Why isn't it 99?  I really don't know, but it seems to fall more into a 94 5 1.  94 average 5 exceptional and 1 wanting bad enough to wish them gone.

What I have learned is that it is near impossible to identify those 5 at hiring.  If  I figure that out, I am on easy street.

MSHack
Thursday, December 11, 2003

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