Even If They Are Lazy, Who Hired Them?
Lately, I have heard some complaints from leaders. Their people want to work from home. They want extra vacation. They take advantage.
Then comes the verdict: this generation is lazy.
The research doesn't back that up. But let's skip that argument for now. Say the critics are right about one employee, and that person really is lazy.
Here's the question nobody asks: who hired them?
A lazy employee doesn't show up by accident
Someone wrote the job description. Someone ran the interview, checked the references and made the offer. Someone managed that person, set the expectations and decided what to let slide.
If you end up with a poor performer, part of that is on the organization.
That's hard to hear, and there's a reason. When someone else falls short, we blame their character. When we fall short, we blame the situation. Stephen M.R. Covey said it best in The Speed of Trust: we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.
Blaming the employee, or a whole generation, is easier than asking what your hiring missed.
A $300,000 lesson
A couple of years ago, I told a client a candidate was more talk than do. The assessment backed it up.
The client hired them anyway.
Six months later, they let the person go with a severance package. They told me they should have listened. All in, it cost them about $300,000.
How bad hires happen
Every job needs two things from a person: what they can do, and what they will do.
"Can do" is knowledge, skills and experience. A resume and a good interview show this pretty well.
"Will do" is how willing someone is to actually do the work, day after day. A resume shows almost none of it. A polished interview can hide it.
Laziness is a “will do” problem. Yet most hiring still runs on gut feel and an interview. That tests how well someone interviews. Not how well they'll work.
More data? A 2022 review of decades of hiring research, led by Paul Sackett and published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that structured interviews were the strongest predictor of job performance of all the methods studied. Structured means every candidate gets the same job-related questions, scored the same way. A validated assessment (no fluffy stuff) adds what interviews and resumes miss: the will do side.
What to do instead
Define the job before you post it. Write down what the person must be able to do and what they must be willing to do. If hard work and reliability matter, say so, and hire for them.
Use structured interviews. Same questions, same scoring, every candidate.
Add a validated assessment. Get evidence on the will do side before you make the offer, not six months after.
Set expectations in week one. What good work looks like. What's flexible. What isn't.
Act early. When effort drops, deal with it directly and quickly. What you tolerate becomes the standard.
Review your misses. When a hire doesn't work out, ask what your process missed. Fix it before the next hire.
The bottom line
The "lazy generation" story is comfortable. It lets leaders off the hook.
But a lazy employee is a hiring decision and a management decision before it's anything else.
Own those decisions and you'll build a better team.
Want help with your next key hire? Let's talk. info@opt-assess.com
Source
Sackett, P., Zhang, C., Berry, C., and Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34968080/
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