Hire in haste, repent at leisure

I once learned the hard way that hiring a person who does not meet the minimum qualifications for a job is a mistake.

While I was the senior technical writer on a multi-million dollar project, I needed to hire a technical writer to help.

I knew enough to give each applicant a writing / editing test, because writing and editing were THE key skills needed for the job. I created a sample procedure filled with mistakes for the test. The assignment was to edit and format the document to create a concise, logical procedure with no mistakes.

I emailed each applicant the writing test to complete and return before scheduling any in-person interviews. I should have disqualified any applicant scoring below 90%. Unfortunately, none of my applicants scored above 75%.

Instead of not hiring anyone, I downplayed the significance of the test results because I had a limited budget and was under pressure to hire someone quickly. This was a mistake.

I hired a low-scoring applicant and almost instantly regretted it. Over the course of the next year, that employee ended up making MORE work for me, because I had to constantly review her work and fix formatting and grammatical mistakes before her documents could be published. I tried to train her to no avail. I was so relieved when she left for another position before I was forced to fire her.

The next time I hired a writer, I paid very close attention to the results of the writing test. This time, the applicant was a former English teacher who scored about 90% on the test. She turned out to be my most competent employee and the only one who could write at all.

The lessons I learned were:

• Hire in haste, repent at leisure.
• Hire the best, not the cheapest.