3 Signs You've Hired The Wrong Person

A bad hire can be much more harmful to your business than leaving a position vacant, but how do you know if you've hired the employee the previous company was happy to get rid of?

Luckily for most managers, employees are often hired on a probation period, allowing you the opportunity to see if they really are the right fit for your company.

How you monitor your employee in these first few months is integral in ensuring a bad hire doesn't become a permanent obstacle in your business. So what should you look out for?

What are the signs that you've made a bad hire?

1. Productivity has dropped

When an employee doesn't have the required skills, has a bad attitude, or is easily distracted they cost your company money.

One of the more common reasons an employee might be unproductive is the distraction of the internet. A recent Salary.com survey showed that 3% of employees waste over 10 hours per week on non-work related internet sites, with 21% wasting over 5 hours per week.

For the most part, this usage is usually a case of non-productive browsing, using personal email, or simply ‘goofing off’ and ending up down the rabbit-hole of the internet for hours longer than intended.

2. Affects the rest of your team

An employee's ongoing unproductive behaviour is distracting and frustrating to others who are trying to do their job and know this person should be too. No one enjoys having to take up the slack left by your bad hire, and they will become less satisfied with their work environment.

If allowed to continue, a single person goofing off could cause other productive team members to become disengaged and even leave your company out of frustration.

3. Wastes management time

When managers make a bad hire, this usually results in them having to micromanage the employee just to get the bare minimum of work completed.

It also puts extra stress on managers due to additional monitoring, correcting and complaint handling from other members of the team.

Managers may also see themeselves having to spend more time with other members of the team to try and increase overall team morale.

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How to mitigate the damage of a bad hire

When employees work behind a computer screen all day, spotting unproductive internet behavior can be difficult. Often HR and Department Managers ask the IT team to extract reports from the company's firewall to show them what an employee was doing online during a certain timeframe, only to be confused with the results as it is not clear what websites an employee actually visited versus all noise from advertising sites, social sharing widgets and content delivery networks that also appear in the report.

Fastvue Reporter provides clarity to internet reports for HR and Department Managers and saves IT staff time by automatically cleaning the reports of 'web junk' such as advertising and social sharing widgets.

Fastvue Reporter also matches internet traffic to users in Active Directory allowing you to easily schedule internet usage reports to be sent to managers every day, week or month, so they can keep an eye on what their staff are doing online.

Fastvue Reporter can assess web productivity according to your guidelines and shows exactly what is being allowed (or blocked) that shouldn’t be. This provides managers with the evidence required to performance manage bad hires within their probation period, to either improve performance or performance manage them out of the company before too much harm is done.

Here's an example of an unproductive browsing report you may receive from Fastvue Reporter.

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Get Started with a Free 30-day trial of Fastvue Reporter

To get started, head to fastvue.co and download the free 30-day trial of the Fastvue Reporter product for your firewall. You'll be up and running in minutes.