"Who Are All These People? Why Did No One Train Them?"

Josh Bersin , who once stiff-armed me walking by me at a HR Tech trade show, has a good summary of something I think many of us know, but bury our heads in the sand about: boom/bust layoff cycles. Some good examples in this article, which is sadly ultimately a plug for his new book (isn’t everything?), but he has a couple of decent charts. To wit, here’s one on how the “free money” period of 2010 to 2021 represented perhaps the lowest interest rates in, oh, 700 years:

If you look at the general state of the macro-economy right now, especially around “Big Tech” (most of those companies are really “Big Advertising Platform,” but whatever), you see that the American economy is generally only truly functional when there’s a bunch of free money to go around. Even when we raise rates 0.25%, executives lose their mind. It’s almost as if they’re not really that strategic and only know how to play the game when the money is free and risk-taking seems to be rewarded, not penalized. Otherwise, we keep doing these boom and bust cycles of “hire to grow” or “hiring before revenue.” Some normal professions, i.e. running a tile store on a feeder road somewhere, do not do “hire to grow.” They hire when demand for those tiles is great enough that more people would be good. Now, do they bring in those people and immediately train them up well? I have no idea. It’s a fictional example of mine. And since most business training is a donkey turd, probably not.

Bersin’s key point — and it’s probably worth noting that Bersin serves on Boards for many companies that do this regularly — is that when you “hire to grow,” you bring in supposed “A-Players” but they don’t necessarily understand your culture, processes, sales timelines, etc. So you end up, typically, with a lot of “top talent” riding the pine, i.e. posting thirst trap photos to Instagram half the week, because they don’t know exactly what to be doing and everyone is so busy and cannot tell them.

I’ve worked in 2–3 places like this, that were either legitimately “hire to grow” or thought that was their current model. Typically the bouncing ball is like this:

• Bring in people on a sloppy, low-context, over-analyzed-but-not-for-the-right-things hiring process
• One-day onboarding basically consisting of “Here’s your laptop. Ready to do some stuff to make us money?”
• The direct manager offloads onboarding to either HR or other employees on the team; HR does it poorly and other employees do it better, but they’re busy with their own tasks and deliverables
• Some new employees just slide into this weird ether of being present, and being seen as a “top new guy” for six months, without actually doing anything
• Eventually an executive looks at two quarters in a row where the graph goes the wrong way and barks, “Who hired all these people? What are they doing? What the fuck is a SEO manager?”

The main way to combat this obvious cycle is slow growth and hiring tied to need. In such an utopia, hiring works like this:

• Demand is up.
• One or two units feel way busier, and/or revenue is being left on the table.
• The head of that unit gives a specific presentation to the money gate-keepers about what the unit needs, what the comp for that role tends to be, etc.
• That hire gets approved.
• The manager of that unit talks to his/her team about what they want to see from a hire and how they want to structure the interview and selection process.
• They do this together, and end up hiring the best choice in their collective minds. (Yes, there’s still bias here.)
• They bring him/her on and spend 2–3 weeks teaching the new hire the business, the processes, the sales approaches, and who does what.
• At about a month, they give the new hire 1–2 major projects to be involved in, with a “buddy” each time.
• Hopefully by six-seven weeks in, the new hire is ready to handle his own stuff — and well.

The problem with the above bullet points is that they fly completely in the face of how managers and executives like to think about work, which is busy, tasks, more busy, so slammed, everything is so busy, we all work so hard, hustle, grind, we’re all warriors, etc. It feels slow and fluffy and executives and most who become managers would rather move fast and smash things.

Psychologically, that’s why everything has this vague air of rushed and busy on top of it — because that’s the mentality of the managerial class. Whether it’s “rushed and busy” because they don’t want you to pay attention to what’s really happening is tied to your own brand of conspiratorial thinking.

Slow to medium-sized growth and logical hiring doesn’t entirely prevent the layoff boom/bust cycle, but it’s easier to manage if you can do that. You can also think about how to humanely give people the ax. It’s hard, but conceivable.

We can solve some of these problems, but the psychology of the managerial and executive class, the consistency of bias, and the confusing macro-economy and its wild stops and starts mean it’s never quite perfect. Is anything?