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Terminating a Trusted Employee

Concerned about whether an employee is fit for a job? Sometimes your gut knows best

February 01, 2006 — CSO — With any luck at all, most of you reading this will not face the dilemma of having to terminate the employment of one of your most trusted associates. I did. And, in hindsight, the whole situation could have been avoided if I had listened to my gut during the hiring process and in the months that followed.

What follows is an account of the warning signs that kept popping up everywhere, but which I failed to heed. Perhaps it will help those of you who face similar questions about whether someone is the right fit for your team.

Sloppy Clothes and Unpaid Bills

I was one of those "one person" security/asset protection/loss-prevention departments for nearly two years. After that time, I sought to convince the "suits"â¬the C-level executivesâ¬that adding another security professional would save money in the long run. They concurred.

We posted the position on Monster's website and received more than 600 rÃ©sumÃ©s. Once we narrowed the list of qualified applicants to a manageable number, we brought them in for personal interviews. To decrease the candidates' apprehension, we asked them to dress casually. Even then, the majority appeared in suits or sport coats and ties. But not the person I'll call "Steve"â¬he wore a long-sleeved, open-collared shirt and tan khakis. That satisfied "casual" in my dictionary. What was somewhat bothersome about Steve was that his clothes looked like they had been slept in.

We contracted with a national firm to do Steve's background check. The only real negative was that Steve had a number of unpaid monthly bills. Even before we asked him about those bills, however, he told us that because he had been out of work for several months, he had fallen behind in making some payments.

I'm still not sure if his appearance and unpaid bills should have been clues to his future performance. But it fits part of the puzzle.

The Force Wasn't With Him

The candidate we were looking for needed to have some law enforcement experience, which Steve did. While his most recent employment was in security/loss prevention at a large company, prior to that he had been a sworn law enforcement officer with a midsize city agency. Typical of one ex-cop interviewing another ex-cop, we exchanged war stories and forged a common bond.

When you hire a former police officer, in my opinion one of the first thoughts should be, why is he no longer a cop? In Steve's case, he was less than a decade away from retirement. Was he pressured to leave? Was he terminated, and if so, why? Was he indicted? Is he lying about why he left?