The simple explanation is that it's really expensive to fire someone without cause. It takes months because the company has to produce a paper trail proving they fired the person for a valid reason to protect themselves from litigation. That's months of paying an individual who may be incompetent or toxic, months of paying people who put together the paper trail, all the morale damage the individual causes, the damage that might arise from firing someone, even if it's someone no one really liked.

All of those things are costly, probably much more costly than not hiring the right candidate. At least so the reasoning goes.

1. As another commenter pointed out, most jobs are in "at-will" states.

2. Many companies require arbitration instead of litigation to settle any disputes as a requirement of employment.

3. It's just as expensive for the fired employee, probably more so, since if you litigate, you're unlikely to ever work again.

The cost is also not that high in non-at-will states, since there's typically a 3-6 month "evaluation" period where no paper trail is required.

There’s a lot of political bodies focused on playing up the idea that women and minorities are this big bad wolf suing legitimate businesses left and right over nothing, and winning. But it’s a largely fabricated narrative created by people trying to turn the leftist identitity politics arguments into a quagmire by “both sides!”ing the situation.

In reality there’s a substantial burden of proof for someone to win a wrongful termination suit.

Even if you hire two do-nothings and a negative-performing person (consumes half an FTE's day in questions), you still end up with 6.5 productive people. And frankly, a 65% productive workforce is pretty damn good. I've seen lots of companies where <65% of people are productive.

Plus, some of the do-nothing people can be alright with some direction. Sometimes people don't get anything done because they just don't know what to do. I've been on so many teams where the manager said, "we need a person to do X" and they end up with some random person that doesn't really know how to do X. The solution that I've found is to find something they can do and have them work on that. Most projects have no shortage of work that's more time-consuming than difficult.

For negative performing people, I usually give them something kind of busy-work that doesn't involve the rest of the team. They might not be getting anything done, but they also (mostly) aren't weighing down the team by asking them questions all the time.

Why waste time? Why not just fire them?

a) Protect a vulnerable class of people from being fired (say over 40 people)

and not

b) Require 30 forms when firring someone in that class for perfectly valid reasons

Seems really really hard to hit both. You need to err on one side or another.. which way do you go?

There are plenty of people in non-vulnerable classes who regularly do indefensible things because they know their companies won't act on it.

I've also explicitly called out the FAANG hiring practices, which are frequently held up as the best practices in the industry by those doing the hiring. After all, who wants to be even partially responsible for hiring "that guy" when you can not or will not fire them later?

But, here's my point: I've been part of the process that hired "that guy". I was also consulted on the decision to fire "that guy" a month later. I was wholly on board with the action in both cases; and in the process we got two other great employees that we never would have hired if we were afraid of taking chances.

To me it paints a terrible picture. My suspicion is that the dangerous bad hires are not the utterly incompetent people who will flail in place until removed. The dangerous ones are going to energetically do all sorts of peripheral, irrelevant work, try to insinuate themselves into a lot of 'process' type setups, and move around the company in a way that stops anyone from ever noticing that they can't actually do anything. I suspect a lot of BigCos have very weak immune systems against such mobile 'attacks'.

Is there not also a fear that an overworked person will become toxic?

Apparently not at my employer. My team was 10 people 4 years ago, and we're down to 6 now, without much dip in workload. We had someone leave about a month ago, and we're still fighting to get a job rec to replace that person.

[1] https://changemyview.net/2018/03/28/thats-bullshit-rude-enou...

They miss basics of OO programming etc. And then what? you take him in, which has costs time, money, hardware to let him go within a month? On the other side I think you can weed these out quite fast with 1 personal interview.

Looking back, often no talent has been better than poor talent (or those that actually decrease group productivity). Huge opportunity cost with bad hires, and even more challenging to move them out to somewhere that they would be happier/more effective/less disruptive.

In those circumstances, it's easy to imagine the mental math: Firing someone could cost many times their salary, but a screening service costs 50 bucks per candidate. So the chance of weeding out one bad candidate pays for the service, right? Where's the fallacy?

I think the fallacy is that the service doesn't actually improve the hiring process, and the ROI is zero.

That in itself isn't unreasonable. While much of the US has at-will employment, most of the rest of the world does not, and hiring the wrong person can be extremely expensive.

However, I suspect with current hiring trends we should not attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.

Interviews are imperfect, and damaging candidates will slip through the cracks. Are you seriously suggesting that a business should decide not to fire someone based on their immigration status, rather than their performance and integration with the team?

Plus now there is a 60 day grace period for H-1Bs to try and find a new job.