Weed Out Toxic Employees Before They Join Your Practice

We are focused on attracting and retaining top talents by employing every possible way to improve our employer brand and stand out in the talent marketplace. Very often we fall into the trap of hiring toxic people under the pretext that they have a tremendous resume or their college grades were outstanding. Not being able to filter toxic people right from the first interview stages may cost the practice a lot more than not hiring anyone. In fact, in a 2015 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article entitled “It’s Better to Avoid a Toxic Employee than Hire a Superstar”, Nicole Torres a former senior editor at HBR points to those talents or “superstars” -as she called them- can generate 80% of the practice’s profit and will attract other superstars to join the business. However, by avoiding toxic employees, who are talented and productive employees but engage in behaviors that are harmful to the organization for not respecting its rules and violating its policy, the company can be better off and can generate even more money than finding and retaining superstars.

There is a lot that can be learned from job interviewers in large companies when it comes to identifying toxic people. Interviewers ask toxic questions and require the candidate to provide more than one example (usually 3 to five) of a situation and how he was able to handle each situation. They always require more than two references with whom they speak about their experience with the candidate. Interviewers ask a lot of behavioral questions and they repeat the same process at different interview stages employing different interviewers. The hardest part is to be able to understand what impressions does the workplace environment leave on the employee and if this affects his interaction with other team members. It is very common that the employee is unconscious of the fact that he is transmitting bad behavior.

One way to spot a toxic employee is to ask him to describe past situations where he was confronted with coworkers and how he behaved. Another way is to actually get your team involved and ask him to go out together for lunch, dinner, or another event. Christine Porath, a professor of management at Georgetown University and the author of “Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace” emphasizes rudeness and its contagious effect in the workplace. She recommends and insists on the importance of interviewing for civility, getting your team involved, and asking their references about civility. Being civil in fact should be mutual, the employer should be mindful and respectful with the employee if he is expecting to hire civil people. Employers should be role models when it comes to civility moreover they should invite employees to speak up when issues arise so that they can contain them and prevent them from spreading into the whole organization.