NAME : NISHAT TASNIM ID : 1211007030

Hire Slow, Fire Fast

For the entire presentation and report, I have chosen a particular topic from the chapter titled

‘Personality and Values’ and that is: ‘Person- Job fit.’ From my perspective, it is an important

topic to work on because it reflects the impact of an individual’s personality on his job

performance. Linking an individual’s personality to the type of job he undergoes is one of the

most crucial parts of hiring- often ignored by the top level managers and recruiters.

The article I worked on was collected from Harvard Business Review, dated March 3, 2014. The

author was Greg McKeown and it titled, ‘HIRE SLOW, FIRE FAST’. The author claimed that

the leaders have the tendency to hire fast and fire slow where it had to be just the opposite. In

most cases employers hire in a hurry with the urge to fill the new roles and a bias for speed

combined with the high growth drives. They simply put emphasis on skills and competence

rather than focusing on a candidate’s personality trait. Later when it is necessary to fire any

underperforming employee, they are too slow either because they are busy or they want to avoid

the unpleasant firing conversation.

The article has an example of a company, Silicon Valley, which had a massive lay-off due to its

hiring wrong persons during its undisciplined growth. Later on it became a 700-person company

with more than a billion dollars of annual revenue by taking corrective actions and careful

organizational design. The CEO along with her 35 executives followed slow and effective hiring

process triggered by a fast firing process.

The author argued that for three reasons this approach is more compassionate than the

alternatives. First, it serves the world economy with healthy, growing companies capable of

sticking around for the long run rather than bureaucratic companies that will slowly die. Second,

it isn’t compassionate to keep one person, rather it emphasizes the overall success of a team as a

whole. Third, it creates the way to get the right person for the right job. The tagline of this point

is, ‘trying to force someone to be something they are not is neither sustainable nor humane.’

NAME : NISHAT TASNIM ID : 1211007030

The “hire slow, fire fast,” process start by being absurdly selective in who is hired. This

enables the employer not only to focus on the job skill related issues, but also put emphasis on

the candidates’ personality to achieve the ‘natural fit’ for the particular job. For instance, Mark

Adams, the MD of Vitso (a furniture collection), approaches hiring with incredible selectivity. In

addition to multiple interviews, he and his team have prospective employees come and work

with them for a day see each other as naturally as possible. This complex process might get

criticized by lots of candidates and there may occur shortage of possible candidate pool. But

Mark believes it is better to be shorthanded than to hire the wrong person.

At the end of the article, the author has put emphasis on taking the firing decision rapidly and

wisely. From his point of view, where the problem is a basic personality clash, endless rounds of

feedback and a painful performance improvement plan is not the solution. The writer ended the

article by urging that the firing process should be humane and as friendly as possible.

The article reflects the concept that only skill and competence are not the only things that bring

in efficient job performance. For a job to be performed better, an employee has to be the natural

fit for the job by his specific personality and specialty.