I saw a tweet last week that I have not been able to stop thinking about: "If your employee isn't an A-player at day 90, they'll never be an A-player."

My first reaction was well that’s not ALWAYS true, if I'm honest. Because I think to myself, depending on the role everyone needs time to ramp up. But then as I reflected on the best players in our organization and those who didn’t make it, I realized it was almost a 1 for 1 correlation.

That being said, I wanted to see if there was any research behind it and there was TONS.

Dr. Brad Smart ran one of the largest hiring studies ever done, across six companies and about 1,000 hires. Before those companies started rigorously tracking early behavior, their mis-hire rate was 69.3%. Two out of three, wrong. Once they started grading people hard on what showed up in the first 90 days, that number dropped to 10.5%.

Notice that the ONLY thing that changed was the measurement.

Skill takes time to build, sure, most research puts full productivity at 8-12 months, some roles I would argue even longer (like a highly specialized/personal role).

But a person’s character doesn't take that long to show up. Do they take ownership? Are they coachable? Are they kind? How they respond the first time you tell them they're wrong.

That shows up almost immediately, and it does not meaningfully change after.

You are not watching for competence at day 90. You are watching for TRAJECTORY, and the trajectory is set early.

So why do we all sit on it anyway, even once we KNOW what’s going on?

I would argue none of us are dumb so that can’t be it 😛

Instead, I would argue it's one of two things majority of the time…

Sunk cost. You already spent the effort (time + money) recruiting them, the hours training them, the political capital defending the hire to your team and the others who interviewed them. Cutting them now feels like admitting all of that was wasted. However it’s backwards, every extra month is MORE sunk cost, not less.

Ego. YOU made the decision. Moving fast on a bad hire can feel like moving fast on admitting you were wrong. So instead of a clean decision you get a slow one, "let's give it one more quarter," which is really just a stall so you don't have to admit, you were WRONG! (Surprise, you are human!)

Here's the part that can help reframe this: 

The LOWEST cost of a bad hire is 30% of first-year salary, that's just the direct cost. Factor in the manager hours babysitting them and the good people who underperform because they're carrying a teammate, and you're at 3-4x salary. Executives have found supervisors spend 17% of their time managing underperformers. That's basically a full day a week, spent investing in someone who won’t work out anyway (imagine if you spent that time on your A-list stars instead!)

Three things we can do differently to mitigate this:

So here's what I want you to reflect on this week: Who on your team did you already know the answer to by day 90, and what's the story you've been telling yourself about why you haven't acted on it yet? Been too long? Do you like them a lot? You got too used to the underperformance?

Let’s get it.

- Leila

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