Why is it so bad to have a bad employee among the first employees ? I don't understand why it is that bad because it seems that if he/she is bad, you'll notice quickly and then can just fire him/her. Even here in Belgium where employee contracts protect more the employees than the company (at least that's the theory), at the starting period, firing can be done very quickly and I think it can be done even more easily in the US.
Also I think the best way to see if someone's good or bad is to put that person to work. This would e.g. mean that if you have filtered out candidates to 8 persons, you could get the one you prefer to work for 1 week. If your choice was bad, you try the second. In the worst case, you have made a very deep assessment of 8 candidates in two months. I mean that I don't understand the point of recruitment processes that take weeks with all kind of proxy metrics for how a candidate would fit in a very small team.
If you can't find out in a week that the person is bad, how can a recruitment process be better ?
Edit: I'm surprised by how the 1 (paid, in my mind) work week is perceived in the (so far) 3 answers below. It happens all the time to have phone interviews, HR interviews, technical interviews, possibly pseudo-psychological tests, and technical tests in a recruitment process. All that time without being paid (sometimes well before you know what the salary could be). It's all about trade-off, I'm not talking about ditching the selection process and instead hire-and-fire liberally. My question was really just about why is it so damageable to get a bad hire.
You'd be surprised at how hard it is to mentally get yourself in the position to fire one of your early employees. Also, I've seen founders delude themselves over someone's competence for months.
Hiring and firing willy nilly is also very, very bad for morale. And those people you interviewed two weeks ago will be starting a job for someone else and you'll have to start hiring all over again.
I don't know how bad the job market is for employees in Belgium, but any self respecting job hunter here in the US would balk at the idea of such a scheme. Would you be paid for your week of work? What in god's name would you do for just a week? You'd still be getting your log-ins and payroll sorted out. Say you are the 5th choice, what are the odds that you'll have found a job already, one that will pay you for more than a week of work? What about, you know, laws that say you must have cause to fire someone (yes, CA is not a state that has those). If you get sick, does that disqualify you, a car accident?
Suffice to say, if an employer does this scheme to you, run.
Also, maximizing the time sunk into finding employees and the payoff for a good one is a solved problem, known as Optimal Stopping theory or the Secretary problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
> Why is it so bad to have a bad employee among the first employees?
Bad employees are a cancer. They literally spread and infect otherwise healthy employees.
When a bad employee is retained another employee who is at a similar level who does good work begins to see that management is unfair. It is not fair to compensate two people equally when their work is not equal.
Also, the good employees begin to see that management is failing to do their job managing people.
And the list goes on and on.
In a startup the team is very small and resources are tight. For example, if there are 2 founders and 1 employee (who's bad), then 1/3 of the company's capacity is being wasted. Actually, it's worse than that. What happens is that the 2 founders waste additional time "managing" this employee, discussing how to handle the situation, etc. Basically, it's a big time suck at a point in the company's life when time is extremely valuable.
It sounds like what you're proposing is turning the first week(s) into part of the recruitment process (a probation period basically). That approach has its own issue, but I interpreted Sam's point differently. The problem isn't about recruiting process not sufficient to determine whether an employee is good or bad, but rather about knowingly hire a mediocre employee, for one reason or another.
Also I think the best way to see if someone's good or bad is to put that person to work. This would e.g. mean that if you have filtered out candidates to 8 persons, you could get the one you prefer to work for 1 week. If your choice was bad, you try the second. In the worst case, you have made a very deep assessment of 8 candidates in two months. I mean that I don't understand the point of recruitment processes that take weeks with all kind of proxy metrics for how a candidate would fit in a very small team.
If you can't find out in a week that the person is bad, how can a recruitment process be better ?
Edit: I'm surprised by how the 1 (paid, in my mind) work week is perceived in the (so far) 3 answers below. It happens all the time to have phone interviews, HR interviews, technical interviews, possibly pseudo-psychological tests, and technical tests in a recruitment process. All that time without being paid (sometimes well before you know what the salary could be). It's all about trade-off, I'm not talking about ditching the selection process and instead hire-and-fire liberally. My question was really just about why is it so damageable to get a bad hire.