It’s no secret that we’re huge believers in the importance and value of building a strong company culture. If the holidays turned your brain into mush and you missed our latest blogs on culture, you can catch up on a few of them here, here and here! In the day and age of intensified competition, culture can be a solid and compelling differentiator.
And with the Millennial generation bursting onto the career scene with demands of fulfillment, flexibility and fun, culture has moved well beyond a nice-to-have and landed in the must-have list for any company who wishes to stay relevant in the 21st century. But I don't think I’m telling you anything groundbreaking - if you read (like at all), you know that company culture has been the topic du jour for several years. So today, I’m less interested in reiterating its importance and more focused on showing you how a bad hire can destroy the culture you’re working so hard to build (or seriously thinking about starting to build!).
Whether you’re a start-up, a successful company in growth mode or a well-established enterprise-level organization, a bad hiring decision can cripple you. I’m not talking about someone who didn’t do his or her job quite as well as you had hoped- that’s a separate issue that can be dealt with as swiftly, lovingly or diplomatically as you see fit. What I’m defining as a bad hire is someone who turns out to be a person you never ever would have hired if only you’d known during that fateful interview what you later learn through the days, weeks, months and Heaven help you, even years, that person works for your company.
If you’re reading this and so far can’t relate, consider yourself incredibly lucky. But don’t stop reading. Because if you’re invested in growing your company, additional hiring is an inevitable part of your future and this article will haunt your dreams if you stop reading now.
If you’re reading this shaking your head, thinking of the hiring missteps you’ve made so far, this article will serve as reinforcement to help you never make the wrong hiring decisions again.
Here are 3 reasons you should treat the hiring and interviewing process as one of, if not the most, important responsibility you have as a business owner or business leader.
Bad apples destroy client and customer relationships
Closing a new deal, converting a lead to a new customer, winning business from a personal referral - this isn’t easy stuff. Companies rejoice, ring bells, award commissions, give bonuses and base promotions on the ability to bring in new business. Once a sale is made and a new client exists, it’s the responsibility of your employees to keep that customer happy. If the client isn’t happy, chances are you won’t keep them as a client for very long. So what happens when a bad hire (henceforth called a “bad apple”) interacts with that customer?
I’ll tell you what happens. The bad apple upsets the customer in any number of unacceptable, embarrassing or devastating ways. It can happen at any level of the organization, from your entry level bad apples right up to Director and C-levels positions. Bad apples don’t have your company’s best interest at heart. They have their own best interest at heart. For whatever reason, they are unhappy, either outside of work or because of work, but that unhappiness manifests in treacherous interactions with your hard-earned customers. It can be rude customer service. It can be laziness or neglectfulness. It can take the form of a bad attitude or unwillingness to compromise. It can even rear its ugly head as deliberate wrong-doing. But be warned, a bad apple can wreak havoc on the relationships you’ve worked so hard to build. Which brings me to my next point - ruined brand credibility.
Bad apples ruin your brand credibility
Other than your product or service, your brand and its reputation is likely your biggest asset. Sure, if you’re a brand new company, you may not have yet amassed huge brand recognition, but every company starts somewhere and any brand-appeal or credibility you’ve established is like gold. Your brand and the way your audience views it can be the make or break factor in long-term success. You’d do anything to build it up strong and anything to protect it, right?
So imagine what happens when a bad apple penetrates your organization. His or her bad appleness makes a mark on everything touched along the way. They might speak negatively (or falsely) in public about you and the company. Perhaps the product or service they deliver to your customers is shoddy. Maybe they refer other less-than-savory hires to your job positions and build a team of bad apples before you realize what’s happening. Before you know it, the brand you’re so proud of is leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths - and you might not even know it for some time to come. The work you’re doing to create a reputation of value, honesty, fairness, expertise (insert your own brand adjectives here) can easily be destroyed by someone who cares nothing about the blood, sweat and tears you’ve put into making your company strong. Years of effort can be demolished with just a few words or actions, and then what do you do?
Bad apples hurt the good people you’ve hired
I’ve saved this point for last because it’s so critically important to remember. There’s a good chance you have some awesome, devoted, passionate, humble and selfless people working for you or with you. These folks are the lifeblood of your organization and everything they touch just shines. What happens to them when a bad apple slithers its way through your company? So often, it’s the good people who get burned the worst. Because these are the people in the throws of daily operations, on the frontlines executing the tasks necessary to be successful. They often see the bad apple’s character flaws before leadership is able to. But, rather than “whistleblow” or “tattletale” or even just generally complain about the crappy, indelible mark these bad apples are making, your best employees will just suffer in silence, even taking on extra work to make up for what the bad apple is lacking.
On the job, they wrestle with the internal dilemma of how to handle these prickly personalities, and on their commute home or at dinner with their spouse ponder what they can do to better deal with the difficulties created by their negative co-worker. As a business leader, knowing that your worthy, devoted workforce are burdened by the ongoing negative impact of a bad apple should make you sweat. Because people can only handle so much and before long, the good people will have no choice but to move on or crumble under the pressure. And as the team leader or business owner, you’re left to pick up the pieces of that unfortunate situation. Plus, it’s just generally unfair for good people to suffer - and that’s what a bad hire creates: suffering.
So it’s clear that a bad hire can have profoundly negative consequences on an otherwise awesome company, but what can you do to avoid making that bad hire to begin with? It all comes back to culture. Without properly defining your culture and without having a concrete understanding of the kind of culture you need to thrive, it’s almost impossible to avoid bad hires. By focusing on your culture in every organizational initiative, especially HR and hiring, you can create a process to easily avoid or sidestep bad apples that are trying to manipulate their way into your company.
Stratus has made its fair share of hiring mistakes through the years, but when we invested in a commitment to company culture, our mistakes became much fewer and farther between. Culture can’t be an afterthought - it’s a necessity for growing in the right ways - the ways that position you for long-term success. If you’re ready to make a commitment to culture and avoid bad apples, use our free guide to get started. We can’t promise you’ll never make a bad hire again, but if you can avoid even just one, isn’t it worth it?
