Comment by ghaff

4 months ago

Provisional hires (which often exist in theory but they're pretty much a formality in general) don't work for the most part. Lot of overhead for the company. And in many cases you're asking for the candidate to quit a job and possibly relocate on the possibility they'll get a new position assuming that they click in a short time interval.

So, accept the overhead as the cost of hiring the right people?

  • There's even more overhead on the people being provisionally hired.

    Yes, sometimes things just don't work out. But, if someone quits a job and maybe relocates, that's a big personal cost. It's just the way things work in some limited contexts (e.g. professional sports) but it's not and shouldn't be the norm.

    I suppose you can give a huge sign-on bonus with no claw-back provision, but that's never going to happen in most cases.

    • I'm fully convinced the way to make better hires is to invest more, which will be more expensive. Which wouldn't be a problem unless we expected something else. It starts with quitting pretending the current process is working, or even close to optimal.

      4 replies →

Who said anything about relocation? That has to be a tiny percentage of hires.

  • Relocation used to be pretty common for professional jobs. Don't know about today when there's more remote work. And maybe companies aren't as willing to pay for in general.