A recruiter only has a couple of interviews and a few references to go on before deciding to hire someone in the belief that they’re the ideal person for the job. That’s usually quite difficult, considering that nobody would marry someone based solely on a couple of dates and references from their previous partners.
The cost of hiring the wrong person is high, but the cost of keeping the wrong person can be much higher. We can get it wrong when we hire someone, but we can’t afford to get it wrong by keeping them in the company longer than necessary. Just as in the stock market, if a stock doesn’t behave the way we expected, we must cut the loss immediately before it grows.
If what we’re investing in an employee is far greater than their contribution to the company, we need to see it immediately and quickly make the decision to let them go.
See also: 6 signs that you should fire an employee
Since nobody is immune to hiring the wrong person, we should at least have the tools to assess their performance in the first few weeks and see how the employee is developing. This is where Eben Pagan’s method comes in. It doesn’t solve the problems of hiring, but it’s effective at making sure we don’t keep an employee much longer than necessary: we’d often know within 30 days at most.
Eben Pagan is the creator of Double Your Dating, a dating website, which led to the creation of a multi-million-dollar company (Get Altitude) focused on improving people’s businesses and personal lives. Pagan has devoted his life to learning about behavioural psychology and marketing in business, and he created a simple system that measures the progress of the person we’ve hired over 30 days.
In short, Eben Pagan’s method basically consists of the new employee telling their boss three things at the end of each day during their first month:
- What they did that day and the results they got.
- Any problem or challenge they faced that day.
- The questions they have for their boss.
As a rule, this task takes no more than 5 minutes a day. It can be done face to face, or by email if distance or time makes that impossible.
This way we can see how the person is developing, the challenges they face and the difficulties they have, and above all whether they’re up to the job or not, whether they’re making progress or not, whether they have the experience or lack it. They’ll also ask questions, and the questions a person asks tell us a lot about them.
With this simple system, we can probably tell within the first 7 to 15 days whether this is the employee we were looking for, or whether it’s better to cut the loss and look for another investment.
It may sound silly, but look at it more closely: sometimes the solutions lie in the simplest systems.
See also: Talent shortage: the 10 hardest jobs to fill worldwide and the role of human resources
Featured image: Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
