Why Hiring Practices Are Important

I’ve already written about the long-standing feud between line managers and Human Resources (HR) personnel; how the line people feel that HR takes forever to move on even the most critical hiring needs and regards petty regulations are more important than the organization’s primary mission, while the HR people regard line managers as impatient, loose-cannon types who wait until the last possible moment and then want their needs taken care of overnight. I’ve also mentioned what can happen when you attempt to fill a high-profile position without taking the time for a proper background check. But since those posts hit, I’ve had people ask if I’m making more out of this issue than it really deserves. Sure, hiring an on-air personality for a national cable network, or promoting a supposedly-true book, you’d have to be very careful, but if all you’re hiring is low-level personnel, say for a junk food stand, what difference could it make?

Unfortunately, that’s another one of those rhetorical questions that you really shouldn’t ask in practice. There’s a by UPI Story online this week about the manager of a Chuck E. Cheese’s in Indianapolis who is alleged to have turned away three different families of African-Americans because he does not like African-Americans and is apparently too stupid to realize that their money is just as good as anyone else’s. As a result, the company has now been hit with two different racial discrimination lawsuits. It is unknown, at this time, how many more people this individual has offended, or for that matter, how many people will decide to bring lawsuits of this type. To be fair, since none of these legal actions have come to trial yet, we can’t say for sure if any of the people suing even have a case, much less whether the manager in question actually did anything wrong. But it points out the harm a single bad hiring decision can do…

Consider that Chuck E. Cheese’s is a national chain, with well over 500 locations and annual sales in excessive of $248 million as of this writing. Not a particularly big operation compared to, say, McDonald’s, with over 31,000 locations world-wide and sales estimated in the $23 billion range, but still a large company, employing thousands (probably tens of thousands) of personnel. Consider that, even if all of the lawsuits are proven in court to be absolutely true (which, I repeat, has not yet happened) they are still only evidence of one (1) racist employee. Now consider the thousands of dollars these legal proceedings are going to cost the company in legal fees, the hundreds of thousands these cases will cost to settle (or pay off, if the court cases go south), and the millions of dollars in lost revenue that this case is already costing the company, win or lose. Do you think it might have been cheaper to have just screened its personnel a little closer during the hiring process?

Of course, the whole thing could still blow over. The lawsuits could turn out to be frivolous; the manager could turn out to be a paragon of tolerance and racial harmony; the plaintiffs could turn out to be the sort of troublemakers we heard about last year, tearing up the kid’s pizza restaurant because they can and then getting offended and suing because someone told them it wasn’t cool to let THEIR children run amok. What I am really suggesting here is that hiring is one of your key functions as a manager, and it will always be worth taking a few extra minutes of your time to get a better idea of what sort of people you are hiring before you make the final decision. Because you don’t want anything like this happening to your company…