Hiring the best talent is a challenge that a manager faces at regular intervals. People move, teams grow and organisations thrive. This changing status-quo ensures that new faces join an organisation and the others leave. While expansion of team and growth of an organisation are positive changes, people leaving teams due to incompatibility with the role or the team is a negative change. In times like these, this negative change forms a more overbearing stature as compared to the positive ones. What are the reasons then, for people leaving an organisation within a couple of years where others have stayed on for more than five?

The answer to this quandary is pretty simplistic – absence of fitment analysis.
Let’s understand this through a simple example of drilling bits that are used with your power tools.

Case of the force-fit

People are individuals. Individuals have their own temperament and they join an organisation with a belief of adding value that is commensurate to the investment that the prospective organisation has made in them. I am talking about high performers. Steve, in our case, was responsible for content delivery, program management, building a positive brand perception and handling multiple vendors in his previous organisation. Steve probably knew more about the business that the guys selling the business to prospective clients. Steve, as we know, was yearning for more challenges. This yearning could not be satiated at his previous organisation and he moved to this new one, on promises galore.

Once in the new organisation, Steve realised that this place was able to leverage just 20% of the knowledge and ability that he had to contribute to the organisation. Steve is a high performer. In this case, Steve was a force-fit. He decided to move on when he was told that he cannot write copy. Steve had always doubled up as a copywriter and this was communicated multiple times to his new boss, during the interview stages.

You can visualise Steve’s predicament by assuming him to be a 6 mm nail that was being force-fit into a hole drilled by a 2 mm drill bit. When you try to perform such an act, there are two repercussions – the nail gets bent and the wall develops a crack.

When a manager hires a person just for the sake of filling a vacant position without giving two thoughts to fitment analysis, the nail gets bent and the wall develops a crack.

Case of the loose-fit

A similar situation arises when a low performer is hired just for the sake of hiring or through back-door parlays, for a role that demands a 6 mm nail for a hole drilled by a 6 mm drill bit. You would have come across many loose-fits, the 2 mm nails that have been ‘somehow’ hanging on to the 6 mm hole. They are the loudest, the most unreliable and the worst performers. But they keep hanging on because they have been there for a long time and are ‘veterans’.

Times have changed and any manager worth their title, cannot afford to hire a loose-fit or a force-fit in their teams. The need of the hour is to hire a perfect-fit – a person who gets to learn more than they had, in their previous organisation, and can leverage their skills while acquiring the new ones on the way. If your organisation cannot provide the new skills that change with current times, you should probably look for a change yourself, let alone hire people for your team. Introspect.