When hiring people, *DO NOT GO* for the least worst one just because you need people.

A short summary of a couple of years long journey of bad hiring decisions.

I was thinking about writing this short post for about three or four months.

At 3DGIS, we are still a small company. We are growing constantly and we are currently at the knee of the growth curve. This means we are currently actively looking for new hires (take a look to https://www.3dgis.it/it/lavora-con-noi/), and doing head hunting (what a bad term!).

We are a knowledge intensive company. You need to know a lot of different things to work with us (geography is fun). So, you could learn a lot and really take advantage to improve your skills and build a solid ICT career.

Let me tell you a story.

In 2020 we needed at least two more developers to carry out our daily duties. The ICT market in Italy was already drained from the Internet Of Things government laws (Industria 4.0). Big companies are without any sort of doubt more appealing than us, with more “benefits” and more career chances. I do not want to speak about advantages and disadvantages of corporations and SMEs in this post.

We started doing job interviews. We had limited time to find people, so after the first round we started to restrict the possible candidates. No-one was a perfect fit for any position, so we ranked the candidates with the least worst metric.

Please do not do that!

You may ask… Why?

Just because if you should never settle when hiring. If it is not a fit for the position, it is just not the person you need.

Hiring should be done as marriage, with a time frame of forever. If you settle for the least worst, you will find your company filled with not so good people. You should choose at least a 1x developer, the normal one. DO NOT SETTLE, NEVER.

In the meanwhile revise your internal processes and optimize things and tasks (use metrics!). You may find nice surprises about your real productivity.

What if you hired non optimal people?

Have a conversation with them. Try to find a solution. If a solution is not viable, stop working with them as we did.

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