Absenteeism and tardiness creep up. The manager gradually shifts some of the workload to other, higher-performing workers.

It's like the slow creep of some deadly disease, with the whole department or business being silently but steadily reduced in effectiveness and morale. As the manager, you wish people like this would just disappear, but it seems they never do. They just seem to hang on and on…

In some circles this is labeled "presenteeism," and having these low performers at work may be costing you more than if you paid them to stay home! Top performers, saddled wit the extra load of carrying dead weight, may simply choose to move on, taking advantage of the current job market to go somewhere not requiring them to carry low performers on their back. Customers who interact with them think twice before bringing their business back to your company.

If you have low performers in your operation, and you think they will eventually go away, think again- they may have already outlasted your two predecessors and are planning a party around your eventual departure!

What can you do, then, to solve this dilemma?

Identify the problem in clear, measurable terms. If you've been meaning to set performance standards for each job in your area, now is the time. Absenteeism, tardiness, missed productivity levels and timeline delays could all become part of a set of performance standards (although you will be well advised to set these standards in their more positive polar opposite verbiage.) Meet with your low performers, lay out the expectations and the places where performance regularly falls short and make clear what the specific expectations are for future performance. Make it clear these expectations will be tracked and frequently evaluated. Then do just that - make the consequences of failing to meet these goals clear and enforceable.

Work your plan. Execution is the key. Follow your scheduled evaluations of performance with clear feedback. If expectations are not being met, give the feedback immediately. While your fondest hope may be to see these people improve their performance, it's much more likely you are simply documenting the path to the door. Either way, timely feedback, action on promised consequences and consistent application are your key to solving the problem.

Document your process. Since the odds are highly in favour of the eventual departure of your low performers, make sure you have clear documentation of the entire process, from identification through consequences.

If performance, after all this effort, falls short of benchmarks, fire them!

One successful manager said, "The most expensive time an employee is on my payroll is the interval between when I decide to fire them and when they go out the door."

Because firing someone, especially someone who has been with the business for a long time, is very painful, you may find yourself procrastinating. Your delay at this stage can only compound the damage.

Following Jack Welch's advice to remove the bottom 10 percent of employees each year is not an easy path, and you may differ in your approach to making your business better, but to ignore a consistently low-performing employee is to ensure your operations will never be as good as they could be.

Of course, when it is time to hire a new employee, we would all like to avoid replicating the departed one! This is the opportunity to use a well-structured hiring process, information from assessments and other sources, background checks and any other valid information you can gather to try to add a top performer to your business.

Studies have shown top performers, in nearly any business, will out-produce low performers by anywhere from 200-to-900 percent! Imagine the effect on your company, if you could replace one low performer with one top performer Then, imagine you did it again and again... The good news: You can!

Toronto architect Gordon Ridgely admits he used to slack off when it came to checking references for potential hires. He figured he didn't need to do much homework to find a good core group of administrative staff to run his business, Ridgely Projects. And that corner-cutting freed up more time to focus on his design work and on cultivating relationships with clients such as Conrad Black and former Ontario lieutenant-governor Hilary Weston.

Failing to call former employers for reference checks "was stupid of me," concedes Ridgely. He wound up hiring a series of horrible administrative employees, including one who stole several thousand dollars from him and another who was repeatedly threw important documents in the trash. These days, Ridgely always performs reference checks, which have convinced him not to hire seemingly qualified candidates on several occasions.

"Doing so has since given me a much better idea of the contribution people will make," says Ridgely. In the process, he says, his firm has saved tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, as well as the time and energy needed to fix mistakes made by bad hires. Even if an employer is skittish about commenting about a former employee due to legal concerns, that skittishness tells you he or she likely has serious reservations about the potential hire, says Ridgely.

Failing to check references is just one of the classic hiring traps companies fall into. But you can learn from the mistakes of others. We asked HR experts to give us the skinny on the five most common hiring blunders — and how to make sure your next hire doesn't damage your firm's bottom line.

The four-minute decision: Most hiring decisions are determined just four minutes into the interview process, says Mark Jackson, managing director for the Western region of The Hay Group, a Vancouver-based human-resources consultancy. What follows is either the "halo" or "horn" effect, in which you spend the rest of the interview looking for information to prove your initial impression. This temptation is tough to resist because most people subconsciously hire people like themselves, whether because of similar education or even attire. Jackson recommends asking two colleagues who don't think the same way as you to conduct the follow-up interview and then offer you their opinions. You can sit in on that interview, but don't take the lead — since even your questions can influence your colleagues' impression of the candidate.

Over reliance on personality tests: The widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and other personality tests are a popular way to bring seeming objectivity to the hiring process. Yet Jackson says many hiring managers use them with the assumption that they know the kind of personality — such as what Myers-Briggs defines as a discoverer, a facilitator or a protector-required for a given position. You should run an experiment within your company to assess people who are really good at a particular job, and see whether there's a common type identified in the personality test, says Jackson. Sometimes there isn't, so you could lose out on a terrific candidate who doesn't fit the personality type you assumed the job required. *Editor's Note: (See Ipsative vs Normative Assessments below)

Rushing to fill the void: Hiring managers feel pressure to replace an empty desk simply because phone and e-mail messages are going unreturned. But don't hire a replacement just for its own sake. This is an ideal opportunity to see if tasks can be performed differently or better, says Tim Rutledge, lead partner of the retention practice at IQ Partners Inc., a Toronto-based provider of executive search, outplacement and other HR services. Maybe tasks can be shifted, giving employees new challenges. Perhaps a part-time employee is all you need. "Revisit the company structure, just for a moment," advises Rutledge. You may even discover the job was becoming obsolete anyway.

Neglecting Plan B: Candidate A is perfect, so you draft a job offer, only to discover the candidate has accepted another position. Marshall Schnapp, a partner at New Media Links, a Toronto-based HR firm specializing in technology and interactive industries, says once a firm locks onto their favourite candidate they don't often have a discussion about who should be the second and third choices. "They end up having to start the search over again," he says.

Failing to check references: As Gordon Ridgely's experience suggests, it's crucial to check references. But do it badly and you can still blunder. Say the reference you call provides a glowing recommendation of a potential hire — only it turns out that reference wasn't the candidate's supervisor, but a colleague and personal friend. Schnapp says this happens more than you'd think. Do an easy check: call the main number of the candidate's former employer and ask for the supervisor of the department your candidate worked for to ensure you speak to the right person. That call could be the most revealing one you make.

The following extract was taken from an interview with Dr. Patricia Lindley, a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society in July 2005.

It outlines a point on why DISC type tools like Myers-Briggs, Thomas and any other Ipsative assessments should not be used whatever in a hiring situation.

Mr. Creelman: “...Myers Briggs is the test everybody knows, but at the same time experts say don't use it in recruitment. What can personality tests do for us in recruitment?”

Dr. Lindley: “Certainly I'd agree that Myers-Briggs should not be used for selection. The people who developed, publish and market Myers-Briggs would also stress that. It isn't a tool for selection; rather it's a tool for personal development. It can be used in groups to help individuals understand one another but it's certainly not a selection test. 

“For selection, you want to rule out tests that are just referring to yourself rather than comparing you to a larger population. Anything that talks about how you are better at one thing than another, but doesn't compare you to the outside world, isn't helpful. The technical term for these types of tests is Ipsative tests. 

An Ipsative test would ask: ‘Which do you prefer, being in control or being active?’ You might like both or you might hate both and you may say you would like to be in control even though you might actually prefer to be active. You might be operating at a very low level or a very high level but all Ipsative tests tell you is which one you prefer rather than how that preference compares to the other candidates.” 

Remember that The Profile XT™ is a normative assessment that overcomes all of the shortcomings of Ipsative tools described. The Profile XT compares the assessed candidate to two key audiences in the `outside world' referred to by Dr. Lindley above:

1. The general working population as represented by a sample of more than 140,000 assessment takers that form part of the validation and reliability studies for the Profile XT (No assessment vendor has a larger population of assessment takers in their validation study population, and this number is rising all the time thanks to ongoing research).

2. The population of “top performers” in the position that the person is applying for in the form of the concurrent pattern developed from these top performers PXT results.

A relatively large medical practice has used the Step One Survey II™ in its selection process for nearly two years. Recently, the practice shifted its attention to what was perceived as an unacceptable level of early hire failures (27 percent of new hires failing in 180 days or less.) The company enjoys "preferred employer" status in its market and has continued to have a high number of applicants, even as unemployment has declined.

Historically, the practice has used the results of the assessment to influence the hiring decision.

(Average scale scores are appreciably different between the groups of applicants who were hired and those who were not hired.) It is also clear they have not applied consistent criteria to the scale scores by eliminating applicants below criteria levels. (Several hired applicants had one or more very low scale scores on the assessment.)

The data was analyzed for the possible effects of applying different criterion levels to the scores. Criterion 1 was calculated as if no applicants had been hired with any scale score of 3 or less. Criterion 2 was calculated as if no applicants had been hired with any scale score of 4 or less. As the graph shows, applying either criterion would result in a dramatic decrease in the rate of early hire failures.

Criterion 1 would reduce the rate from 27 percent to 21 percent, while only reducing the percentage of hires working beyond 180 days by 5 percent and the applicant pool by a mere 1 percent.

Criterion 2 would further reduce the failures to 17 percent but would reduce the percentage of hires working beyond 180 days by 27 percent, a level that may be unacceptably high. The statistics provide a job-related basis for adopting Criterion 1 and should be more defensible than the current, less-structured approach.

To further reduce the percentage of early failures and provide the increased productivity effects usually associated with improved job fit, the company may well benefit from adopting a job fit assessment for finalists for these positions.