Were you one of those kids whose mom always said, "Please chew your food. Don't inhale it."? Were you the first of your friends to get married, buy a house and start a family? Has anyone ever asked you, "Where's the fire?" If you answered yes to more than one of these questions, then you probably need to take it down a level. If you keep rushing through life, it will eventually catch up with you, as it did with this IT manager in charge of hiring a new analyst almost 25 years ago!
After interviewing a whole slew of candidates for an analyst position in my department, my manager was hard pressed to hire someone quickly. My colleagues and I were tired of working long hours, something that we'd become accustomed to ever since Trevor, the former analyst, had up and moved to Nebraska on a whim. We're still not quite sure what came over Trevor but, for the sake of closure, our department has just chalked it up to his version of a mid-life crisis. After all, Trevor never was the flashy Corvette type.
Being short-handed around the office was starting to wear on everyone, so we all tried to encourage the manager to hurry up and hire someone. He had a lot on his plate at the time, so he kept trying to squeeze interviews in between meetings and during his lunch breaks. After about two weeks of interviews, personnel called him to see if he wanted to schedule follow-up meetings with any of the candidates. Since he was pressed for time, he told the HR person additional meetings weren't necessary and that there was one candidate he'd like to extend an offer to.
The new hire started work the following Monday, but it was immediately clear he was having extreme difficulty understanding the IBM mainframe environment, and he struggled at his main job task of writing analytical documents. He was proving to be more of a hindrance than a help to our department. When he started asking people in our department to review and correct his work, no one was too pleased. However, since it had taken us so long to fill the void Trevor left, we were hesitant to mention the new analyst's shortcomings to our manager.
After three more weeks of picking up the slack for this guy, a few of us finally bit the bullet and approached the manager. The next day, we all felt a bit guilty watching the new guy enter the manager's office and close the door. It wasn't until they sat down and talked one-on-one that the manager realized the new guy he had hired did in fact have great experience, just the wrong type of experience. Prior to coming to work at our company, he had been the lead operator on the Honeywell mainframe, but he had no writing experience whatsoever. In our manager's haste to hire a new analyst, he had mixed up the names of the people he had interviewed and told HR to hire the wrong guy.
So embarrassed was the manger that he decided to cover his mistake by keeping the new guy. When I left the company for another position a year later the same guy was still working there.
The take-away: You can't call it a solution if it doesn't solve the problem.
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