You're Fired!

It's very exciting when you hire a new employee, full of promise and enthusiasm, ready to help take your company to great heights and set the world on fire. Of course, sometimes it doesn't work out, and you've got to fire them. Which is one of the least-fun things about being a boss, in my humble opinion, but it's something you've got to be able to do. Over the years I've learned a thing or two about letting people go.

First of all, chances are you're going to know pretty quickly if someone is right for your organization. You'll likely get a good feel in the first couple of weeks (or days, or hours, or minutes...) and you'll know if it's going to work out. Set clear goals for the worker, and address them if they don't meet them. If they just can't seem to hit their goals after a reasonable amount of time, don't fool yourself into trying to work things out. If you have a strong feeling in your gut that the person isn't right for your company, better to get rid of them quickly and get moving on to the next person. Especially as a small business, you simply don't have the time or resources to hold someone's hand or hope for the best while they continue to flounder.

One of the first employees we every hired (when we were young and stupid) came in with a lot of bravado, telling us how he was going to help us build our business, we were all going to rich - RICH I TELL YOU!!! Well, nine months later we'd heard every excuse in the book from him, and none of us were rich. Quite the opposite, in fact, because we'd been burning through cash paying this joker. After we let him go, it was crystal clear to us that we should have let him go six months earlier. But we were caught up in the emotions of it, trying to work it out, giving him every chance, and, in part, refusing to admit to ourselves that we had hired the wrong guy.

And we had indeed hired the wrong guy, for which we were completely to blame. In our inexperience we simply didn't know how to go about attracting a qualified employee.

We learned a lot from that costly mistake, and today we are much more clinical when it comes to hiring and firing. That's not to say we completely ignore the human element, of course, because there is certainly something to be said for working with people you get along with, especially in a creative, collaborative environment like the one we have at Pixel Workshop. But this is, ultimately, a business. If you can't perform, well, good luck to you, we'll find someone who can. (Fortunately this business is heavy on freelancing, so it's usually easy to give someone a trial run before actually offering them a staff position.)

How about you? Got any interesting hiring/firing stories? Total train wrecks? Ever been stuck in a toxic workplace where you just couldn't wait to escape?

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