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Comment by sarchertech | Hacker News Reader

Firing people isn’t as expensive as people make it out to be. People vastly overestimate the chance of a lawsuit. And they overestimate the chance of a lawsuit that makes it far enough that it costs significant money even more.

Hiring fast and firing fast (for lying or misrepresentation) is almost always a better business decision than being ultra defensive in the hiring process.

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The fastest that I can possibly fire somebody is still months from the date I choose to hire them.

I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the old job, plus probably some time in between roles before they start. So 2-6 weeks waiting here. Then they join and go through the company-wide onboarding and training processes and set up their equipment. Another week.

The first time I actually get to have them do any work is 4-10 weeks from the date I chose to offer them a job. It now takes me some time to realize they are hopeless and misrepresented themself on their resume. Three weeks would be an extraordinary outcome here, but it more likely that this takes 8+ weeks. Even if the actual process of firing them is instant once I've decided that it was a bad hire, I'm still out 3-5 months from the date I chose to hire them. Any other strong candidates I had in the pipeline now have other jobs and I am starting from scratch.

That is incredibly expensive.

This. 100% this.

I can't believe any company would look at this story (which I've heard variations on from multiple peers) and go: "we should save money by not flying candidates out for an on-site and use terrible AI tools to sort our candidates."

Just hire them as contractors first. Give them a 2-3 month contract, if it doesn't work out, you just don't renew the contract.

That only works for desperate people. Sr people or people with other options would not take that risk.

But we've just established in this thread that even senior people are having difficulty findings jobs. This has nothing to do with desperation. Temp contract works both ways, if an employee doesn't like the company or finds another job within the 2-3 months, they are free to leave. This is more than fair.

Ignoring that this seems like a bad way to start a hopefully long-term relationship, this would largely limit your pool to people who don’t already have a job. If a senior candidate already has a job, why would they give it up for a sketchy 2-3 month contract and the vague promise of full employment?

Relationships between an individual and a corporation are fundamentally asymmetrical. They can only be made equal by heavily favouring the single human side.

It's not the lawsuit, it's about the time wasted as a manager and salary to the person as you work out if it's actually time to fire. Performance Improvement Plans, a bunch of back-and-forths. I'm not going to be the kind of person that fires quickly, so there's a bunch of sunk cost we have to take. Plus, fast firing creates a cooling effect among everyone there.

And for what? To save money on hiring? Not worth it.

The counter argument is that firing too slowly can be a serious drag on morale. Leaving your team to carry dead weight can really suck for the team.

Ask me how I know... :)

Okay, so the original argument is about whether or not it's worth it to fly people out for an on-site. Hotel and airfare: $2000 absolute max. Salary at $100/hr for one month for me to figure out it's not going to work out, then pull the trigger to fire: $24,000.

I mean, being a manager is hard, but putting in the time and money to hire and then putting in the time to make sure your team doesn't have a morale drag, it's worth it.

The catch is that even in-person interviews are no panacea. I agree that it's worth the time to filter -- I wasn't really responding to that bit -- but from what I've seen, you have to be a very good interviewer not to get a bad hire every so often.

I often wonder how many hiring managers are actually good interviewers, in-person or not, but I digress...

Seeing the truly bad hires dragged along to the detriment of the rest of the team is a sore spot for me, though. It happens way too often in my experience.

In person interview, or even coffee, filters out those who don’t actually exist and those who are reading answers from a screen (chatgpt/person)

Seems to be 90% of the problem reported on this post

$17k/month, not $24k?

If you're paying people $290k a year, no kidding you should bring them in for an on-site interview?

Oh geez, I see my math mistake. But even at $5k/mo, the point still stands.

Also imagine you are a company with a reputation for hiring people - inducing them to leave their current job - and then often dismissing them quickly afterwards.

That would give many great prospective employees pause before applying to work there, because you are asking them to give up a good thing and take a chance on your company, without commitment.

Far better to screen early.

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