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Comment by simonswords82 | Hacker News Reader

I've created multiple start ups.

"Hire Fast, Fire Faster" is total nonsense. It's "Hire Slow, Fire Fast".

You hire slow because the risk/cost associated with a bad hire is infinitely higher than the downside of not making a hire. Moreover you should always take as much care as possible when you are potentially fucking with someone's career/livelihood.

You fire fast because despite hiring slow you have realised that you fucked up, and made a bad hire. Once you understand the hire is bad it is in both yours and your employee's interest to fire fast - albeit you must always do this with the utmost respect for the person being fired.

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I've seen both, and for the company "Hire Fast, Fire Fast" seemed to be optimal - though perhaps not for the candidate.

When one drags an interview process too long they risk losing out on candidates to faster firms. However, a person's work performance and interpersonal skills are often on-display in about a month or so. This allows one to break contact, ideally with a respectable severance, and keep moving.

At the first professional job I've held, and my golden standard for an employer, they employed this approach. When one accidentally hired a screw-up or a non-team player we simply terminated their employment. The understanding being that our HR handbook is "Be an adult." Putting in rules in a company of 50 to cater to the 1 bad hire, that just punishes the 50 people who did not need the rule.

That sounds great, fair to both sides, etc... until you realize that very few candidates will accept an offer with an employer that fires 10-20% of new hires after a month.

So realistically, in the current job market, you'll either have to deceive the candidate, and carefully hide this wholesome policy, or lose all the good candidates who have other offers and won't drop them to run a serious risk of being fired in a month.

Remember that "not getting along" may mean you don't (initially) jive well with the other team members, not that you aren't an adult. Only a naive (and inexperienced) candidate would believe that "it won't happen to me" if you really are letting people go so fast.

Perspective employees usually have no idea what the fire-rate is at a company they are interviewing at.

Correct, but now this policy doesn't seem very wholesome or sustainable, since it relies on deceiving the candidate to hiding itself and its resulting fire-rate.

The thing is - if you hire slow enough but not too slow to make the process agonizing but slow enough so you fully check candidates's suitability you shouldn't have too many fire fast events.

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