Unhappy with Your New Hire? Now what?

[Joe Marconi]

This has happened to most of us: You have a series of interviews, asked all the questions you needed to ask, did your due diligence, and hire a new employee. 

Two weeks, later, you realize you made a bad mistake.

What do you do, what have you learned from the wrong hire? And how long do you hold on this person? 

 

[Transmission Repair]

On 11/25/2024 at 9:37 AM, Joe Marconi said:

This has happened to most of us: You have a series of interviews, asked all the questions you needed to ask, did your due diligence, and hire a new employee. 

WARNING: Long post.

I think ALL OF US have made bad hiring mistakes at least once.  We are in a unique specialty industry of automatic transmission repair that isn't quite like General Repair. (GR) In fact, we don't do GR work at all.  I have made wrong hiring mistakes more than once.  I can tell several stories when comes to making a bad hire, but I will tell only the most egregious.

I hired a transmission rebuilder from out of state.  He was currently working for a transmission shop that was about 4-5 hours from us.  I first did a couple of phone interviews for starters.  He sounded very confident and knowledgeable over the phone.  I set up the first face-to-face interview for a Saturday because we, as well as his current employer, were closed on Saturday and Sunday.

The things that stood out for me were his demeanor, attitude, and knowledge of the transmission industry.  Long story short, I ultimately decided to hire him.  He also claimed that he could build any type of transmission that was set in front of him.  Because we are in Utah, we have some car makes that are very common in our market, but not so much in other markets.  One of those car makes that is very popular with us is the Honda/Acuras.  Hardly a week goes by without at least one Honda transmission job.

The first hint that I may have made a bad hiring decision was the very first Honda transmission he built didn't work.  We couldn't even take it on a road test.  We call those types of jobs "no-goes."  He took longer to rebuild a transmission than most, but the rest of the transmissions for the week all worked OK.

In the following weeks, most of his transmissions worked OK as well... except Hondas.  The second month of his employment, it was all OK except for Hondas.  The 3rd month he worked, we had 2 transmission jobs come back the same week for warranty repairs; they were Hondas as well.  By this time, I had more than enough no-goes and comebacks to make me suspicious.  I finally started keeping myself in the building room to see exactly what he was doing.  I observed him making more than a few rookie mistakes.  I finally was able to observe him building a Honda transmission and I couldn't believe my eyes.

I equate Honda transmissions to being built like a Swiss watch.  Hondas have a very narrow window for clearances.   Domestic transmissions have, on average, a very wide window for clearances.  Domestic transmission clearances are in the range of .005"-.080".  However, Hondas' have most clearances in the range of .003"-.009".  It all came to a head when on a Monday where we had 3 of his transmissions come back for warranty repairs, and they were 2 Hondas and 1 Acura. (Nearly identical transmissions except Acuras transmissions run counter-clockwise and Hondas run clockwise.)

By this time, I was suspicious enough to call the other transmission shop he used to work for.  He claimed to have worked there 4 years.  That fact was indeed true, but every other thing he told me during the hiring process was bogus.  To me, there's a big difference between embellishing facts and telling a lie.    I asked the other shop if they had any problems with his Honda/Acura.  The shop owner informed me that they only buy used or reman when it came to the Honda/Acura car makes.  I also learned that during the 4 years he worked there I discovered his job was as a parts guy, not a transmission builder.  Holy crap, I swallowed all his lies hook, line, & sinker!

The following week, I spent all my time in the building room to keep an eye on our new transmission builder.  As if making a bad hire wasn't enough, I gave him a 2-week notice of his employment termination to give him time to find a new job.  During that period of time, he did his level best to sabotage our shop.  Once I was made aware, I fired him immediately.

I learned that he had put our tractor funnel used in our waste oil barrels, in the new clean solvent barrel, contaminating all the clean solvent.  Back in the day, most of the technical information was on a CD that I kept in our office after downloading all the information onto our machine's hard drive.  As his last act of sabotage, he re-formatted the shop's hard drive.  Lucky for me, all I had to do was to download all the technical information from the CDs to the hard drive.