Hiring

Abstract No management practices are more important or get more attention than hiring. The practice of it has grown systematically worse over time, such that few employers even try to track how well their hiring is working. This chapter describes the shortsighted aspects of contemporary practice, based on driving down the hiring costs that appear in financial accounting while creating enormous costs elsewhere. The most obvious cost of poor hiring is employee turnover, which drives most of the need for additional hiring. The heart of many of the hiring problems has been cutting recruiters—who are relatively cheap—and pushing their tasks onto line managers, who are both more expensive and overwhelmed with other tasks such that they hire badly. Cutting recruiters appears cheaper in financial accounting because it cuts headcount.