My company hired a dud, despite my warnings. Should I have said more?

Some time ago, I was brought into a job interview panel at the last minute. We interviewed numerous candidates. A few stood out to me and I argued for them, but none made the shortlist – I think my ideas were “marked down” because I had been late to the process. Of the two people who were chosen, one struck me as totally inappropriate. I tried to be as diplomatic as possible in arguing against them. I was concerned when the panel ignored my recommendations and gave this person the job.

It has proved to be the wrong choice. Nobody is pretending otherwise, even those on the panel who advocated for this candidate. I’m not a “told you so” person, and I don’t like to dwell, but I do wonder now whether I needed to be more colourful in my argument against this person.

It sounds like you may have been brought in as a shallow tick-boxing exercise, a way of making sure some rigid HR sub-code wasn’t breached.Credit: John Shakespeare

This would be enormously frustrating. You did everything right, according to the corporate textbook. You dropped everything at short notice to help a team in need. You made the case for and against candidates without resorting to impolitic language or embellishment.

And you graciously accepted the democratic decision of the panel at the narrowing-the-field stage and in the final decision. Despite all of this, the panel clearly made the wrong decision.

It sounds like you’re questioning whether you could have done more to make sure they avoided this hiring disaster. Maybe you could have – we’ll get to that later – but that doesn’t mean this is in any way your fault. Far from it.

Two things in particular worry me about your email. The first is the reason given for other members of the panel ignoring your preferred candidates. It sounds to me like your peers were having their cake and eating it too: they asked you to be an eleventh-hour replacement and then brushed aside your opinion on the basis that you were … an eleventh-hour replacement.

Next time, consider whether you’re being asked to contribute in good faith, or in the interests of meaningless administrative propriety.

This is just silly and patronising. But even if they were right in believing you didn’t have access to the full context of the whole recruitment process, surely your reflections on the interviews alone were still valuable.

I know you haven’t said this explicitly, but I do wonder if the sniffy-ness towards your opinion at the shortlisting stage carried all the way through to the final decision.

From what you’ve told me, it sounds like you may have been brought in as a box-ticking exercise, a way of making sure some rigid HR sub-code wasn’t breached. What a monumental waste of your time.

You said you’re not a “told you so” person, and this brings me to my second worry. The inference I take from this line in your email is that nobody has come to you and admitted your fears were well-founded.

That seems odd to me. It points to an unhealthy discomfort with confronting a blatantly obvious mistake. Either that or it once again underlines how un-seriously your opinion was taken during the deliberations.

The possibility that some members of the panel are walking around today thinking, “Well, we got it terribly wrong, but there was no way of knowing it would turn out like this” is galling to me, so I can’t imagine how it feels to you.

Now, could you have added some spice to your observations during the post-interview discussions? Maybe. But I think if a recruitment process requires panel members to sway their peers with dazzling rhetoric, it’s fundamentally flawed.

My advice would be not to spend much effort agonising over whether next time you need to present a stronger or more colourful case. Instead, consider whether you’re being asked to contribute to such a task or project in good faith or in the interests of meaningless administrative propriety.

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