Should I hire the friend? [closed]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

We have a vacancy open up in our development team. One of the members of the team is an extremely high performer and he wants his friend to join.

Reasons for hiring his friend

• The company has a high turn over, development team comprises of interns where one of the challenges I have is to build a strong full time dev team. I feel that by hiring his friend I may help further convince the high performer to go full time.

• Motivate the high performer to work even harder.

Reasons for not hiring

• Unlike the current developer - the friend's technical skills are not brilliant, I gave him a programming test as part of the interview process and could see that even though he did the task the code was not well written. So there is a part of me thinks that I am not hiring him on merit.

• I am concerned that this can lead to office politics, if I am hard on one member of the dev team, the other member of the dev team is more easily influenced and likely to take sides with the member of the team I am being hard on. I have previously worked in environments like this.

Is having an all friends team good for business? What do you think?

UPDATE

Turned out not hiring him did not impact the company negatively. His friend in the company is still committed

manpreet 2 years ago

Should I hire the friend?

No, you shouldn't hire him with the idea that it will influence the other. Hire him because he's going to be an asset or other reason, but not that.

Recommending a friend should only go as far as helping the friend get an interview, after that it's up to him to make his own way. Most people understand that, and quite a few people are pressured in to recommending people that they don't really know well.

Having friends in a team is usually a good thing, many teams become friends through proximity anyway. It's good for morale, the thing to watch out for is favouritism or covering up for each other which is unavoidable sometimes, you need to limit this as it is a discipline issue.

The other main factor to watch for is friendships can be fleeting and turn bitter. But these are all things you watch for anyway, so on the whole it's a positive thing.