The Cost of a Bad Hire? TRIPLE their Salary!!!!

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The Cost of a Bad Hire? TRIPLE their Salary!!!!

Recruitment, especially in tech, is seriously hard work. Even just for one new team member.

Listing a job, sifting through applicants, interviewing them, re-interviewing the best, negotiating an offer… It’s a lot. Imagine going through all of that, finally hiring a candidate, and waiting for their start date to arrive – only to discover that they’re totally wrong for the job, and completely at odds with your company values.

Their productivity is lower than baseline. They make wildly inappropriate comments. They won’t do anything “beneath” them. They can’t finish a task to spec or deadline. They’re supposed to lead but their team is constantly guiding them.

Members of the team around the new hire are starting to feel unmotivated and undervalued.

Some people are asking questions about how they got the job in the first place.

The whole atmosphere is changed; sour and dark, no chatter or collaboration – just workstation after workstation of headphones and bad moods.

That, dear reader, is a bad hire.

You might think that this is a rare, or even a worst-case scenario. Sadly, it’s extremely common: 85% of organisations have made bad hires at least once. It’s depressing, for sure – but did you know how expensive it is for businesses?

Whatever the salary offered – treble it, and that’s how much it will cost your company.

How a bad hire can end up costing your company 3x the posted salary

It sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? Surely this is just a “big company” problem, and not the case for SMBs? The truth is, a bad hire can infect your company deeply, not just at the point of entry. Here’s where all that money goes.

Recruitment

Good recruitment is not cheap – whether you use an agency or do it in-house. But even doing it half-heartedly is expensive; the lower-end estimate is about £2,500 per hire, and the UK cost per hire average is £3,000.

A bad hire means spending this recruitment cost all over again.

Productivity

If the new hire isn’t all they said they were on paper, then they won’t have the skills to contribute to productivity. You’re paying, but they’re not delivering.

Instead, other team members might pick up the slack, even if they have to stay on late, in an attempt to be welcoming to the new person on their team and to “just make it work”. That’s doubled up work – but far worse is that your good, solid team players are getting burned out.

Teams start to fracture

A bad hire doesn’t necessarily mean a bad person – but often there is a problem with cultural fit. We’re not suggesting that Friday beers is a culture, and that if your new hire doesn’t drink, then they’re a bad fit culturally; that’s just personal choice.

A bad cultural fit is one that doesn’t really care about what you’re trying to achieve, or is at odds with your values as a company. This can seed unhappiness in teams, and cause them to fragment into cliques and silos. Rifts can form, and overall collaboration can be stifled as a result. This doesn’t just harm productivity – it destroys morale.

Your team members don’t have to be best friends (it certainly helps, though!), but they do need to be able to work together respectfully and amicably. If not, people will start to leave. If you’re not careful, it’ll be your top performers who go first. They can often feel that they’ve had to accommodate the bad hire, and have been left to stagnate during their tenure.

Attrition

One bad hire can lead to having to make many more hires to undo the damage. If the team begins to suffer as a result of a bad hire, those not inclined to voice their concerns may become disgruntled – and quit*.

*Bear in mind that this can be a sign of deeper issues. A bad hire making work worse is usually the last kick in the teeth for some people who are already at the end of the employee lifecycle.

Client/customer loss

When quality dives, or key team members leave, clients and customers suffer. This is the final straw for any business, because it’s glaringly obvious that the bottom line is getting hurt.

Don’t let it get this far.

How can you stop a bad hire from getting in?

Well… You sort of can’t. If they interview well, but come into work like a totally different person, that’s just the way it is. You’ll never know until you see them on a day-to-day basis, and see their work (or lack thereof).

Basically, there are no guarantees.

You can change your vetting process, to include skills checks, and ask for previous examples of work. Checking in with former employers is a good starting point, but beware that sometimes a generic response from HR is all you’ll get, and it’s not likely to be a deep-dive into their values and daily output.

Also, be mindful that we’re all human. That new hire might be having a really bad time that you don’t even know about, and this could all just be temporary.

Try talking first.

How to spot a bad hire before it’s too late:

  • Skills are missing that the employee claimed to have
  • Low quality of work
  • Repeated mistakes, even after fair coaching
  • Poor timekeeping and high absenteeism
  • No ownership or responsibility when things go wrong
  • Negative and critical of the company
  • Incomplete workloads are being taken on by other team members
  • Collaboration and communication drops off
  • A noticeable “social void” appears around the new hire

How to respond to a bad hire

  • Find out if their work is suffering because they are. Can you help resolve it?
  • Are they competent, but not familiar with your way of working?
  • Are they motivated to improve?

If the answer to any or all of those questions is a no, then it’s time to terminate their contract, based on your contract agreement and legal obligations.

All that time, just to let them go… 

But for companies who need tech talent, there is a better way.

Generic recruitment can only get you so far. But a specialist recruiter, who knows the job and the people who’ll excel at it? That’s the ideal standard.

This is what we do at ClearHub – the largest global network of Atlassian, DevOps and software professionals in the world.

Created by a team of software and Atlassian experts, we take our deep knowledge of the industry to find the candidates that no generic recruiter can. We consider company culture, technical needs and your existing talent, to find people that will work to build your company.

Our specialist recruiters continue to assist you and your new recruit in their role, with a combination of dedicated project management and technical support should you run into any problems.

The best candidates come to ClearHub. You should, too.

No more bad hires. Get the best talent – with ClearHub.

Our team pairs businesses with Atlassian, Cloud, DevOps and ITSM experts. Everyone in the ClearHub network is vetted, skills-checked and ready to go from day one. We support all our clients and their chosen experts while they’re on the job, too; so you’ll never have to worry about training, upskilling, or making a bad hire ever again.

Get in touch today.

UK contact: Aaron Rowsell

Global Contractor Manager

Email: arowsell@clearhub.tech 

Call: +44 2381 157 811​

US contact: David Runyon

Recruitment Consultant

Email: drunyon@clearhub.tech

Call +1 858 304 1215

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Jira productivity: six tips to help you work smarter and faster

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Jira productivity: six tips to help you work smarter and faster

Many businesses start working with Jira because it can offer fantastic benefits for quality of work as well as productivity. This is a very powerful tool that can be extremely useful in its ability to be deployed by a wide range of organisations while being adaptable to their individual needs; it is highly flexible.

However, for all of its benefits, working in Jira can be intimidating and overwhelming. There is such a huge degree of functionality it can get to the point where staff are actually less productive because they are bogged down in the amazing range of things that they can do.

In this article, we will take a look at some neat and simple productivity tips that can help make Jira easier and more effective to use.

Tip #1: Know your shortcuts

To make the most of Jira, one of the first things that you need to do is to get used to keyboard shortcuts. This can make those common tasks far easier to manage – and it is worth understanding the different global, navigation, issue and board shortcuts, and how to use them most effectively.

You can find a list of Jira shortcuts by clicking ‘Help’ in the menu and then selecting ‘Keyboard shortcuts’ from the dropdown.

Tip #2: Utilise filter subscriptions

One common challenge in Jira is users struggle to get a useful overview of their short term to do list. This can be frustrating and leave you having to awkwardly check through tasks on a daily basis in order to make sure you’re not missing anything. Thankfully however, you can overcome this using a filter subscription to notify you of upcoming tasks.

Create a Jira issue and assign it to yourself, then set it with a due date. Then you can add a filter that searches for any uncompleted issues due in a set time period, for example, in the next three days. You can then create a filter subscription that automatically sends out an email when the date of the task gets below three days.

Tip #3: Create bookmarks

The bookmarks bar is an underrated part of the experience of using Jira. You should consider the parts of Jira that you use most often and simply place direct links to them in the bookmarks bar in your browser.

Some of the areas that you might want to bookmark could include your recently created issues, the JQL query page, and your favourite dashboard.

Tip #4: Add navigation links

It is likely that your team uses a range of different spaces in Jira, perhaps a team hangout or a Confluence space. These can be extremely valuable for productivity and collaboration. But what you might not know is that there is an easier way to access them: adding the spaces to the Jira menu.

You simply “add link” or “add item” to the project, and then get your Jira administrator to add them to the menu for you.

Tip #5: Optimise your profile

There are some useful ways to optimise your Jira profile to stop it from wasting your time and effort and provide you with more useful insights. You can head into your Preferences, and from there it is a good idea to change Email type to ‘HTML’ rather than ‘Text’, as Text will show you there has been a change, while HTML will actually show you the change.

Additionally, it is a good idea to change the My Changes field from ‘Notify me’ to ‘Do not notify me’ – unless there is a really specific reason you need to be notified about work you carry out.

Tip #6: Connect with other apps

Finally, a quick one: connect your Jira to other applications that you use such as Hipchat and Confluence.

At ClearHub, we specialise in helping businesses recruiting the Jira professionals that they need. We have years of experience matching technical staff to the companies that need them. If you are looking to expand your team with Jira contractors, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the ClearHub team today.

How to become a DevOps engineer

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How to become a DevOps engineer

It’s a big industry, software.

There’s a lot of money to be made, and a lot of fun and satisfaction to be had. With skills in DevOps, you’ll always be in demand – as a freelancer, or as an employee. But DevOps isn’t for everyone, and it’s certainly not an easy ride.

Let’s look at what it takes to practise DevOps, and how to become a DevOps engineer.

First – what do DevOps engineers do?

The definition of “DevOps engineer” is pretty broad.

That’s mostly because DevOps isn’t a “thing” that you engineer – it’s a practise, or a culture, or a mindset. It’s a way of working; lean and agile, where small teams with overlapping skills fulfil many roles in parallel.

That doesn’t stop the role being advertised, or the title being used when technically, it doesn’t exist!

Semantics aside, DevOps engineers are highly sought-after.

They’ll usually have the following responsibilities and more:

  • Building and automating infrastructure
  • Writing CI/CD Pipelines
  • Designing DevOps strategies
  • Managing version control (usually Git-based)
  • Working on multiple platforms across different programming languages
  • Creating and configuring container orchestrators
  • Working closely with developers to write well-designed microservices architectures
  • Providing support to internal and external stakeholders
  • Ensuring that all workloads and infrastructure are secure

This is really just a general list, and the actual responsibilities will vary from company to company.

To boil it down to the simplest explanation, DevOps engineers build the processes that turn code into a product.

What will always be true is the need for a solid understanding of the DevOps culture, and a core set of technical skills.

What skills do you need?

DevOps engineers are excellent problem solvers – but they need to be collaborative, and work well with others. DevOps engineers manage teams of developers, so they need to have a strong knowledge of the SDLC (software development life cycle): the six–stage process which guides software development projects. Above all, they need to be excellent communicators and have soft skills to match their hard skills.

As a bare necessity, you need the six technical skills common to every DevOps role. These will be your gateway into technical DevOps and better jobs:

  • Using the Linux operating system
  • Basic programming skills
  • Bash
  • Git
  • Fundamental knowledge of networking
  • Fundamental knowledge of Cloud platforms

If you already have these skills, you can apply for entry-level DevOps roles – for more advanced technical DevOps roles, you’ll need to understand the CI/CD pipeline: the production line of software companies.

How to get DevOps technical skills

As with most things, the best way to learn is to do it for real. This means daily, focused work – making mistakes, learning from them, and logging successes.

Doing this off your own back will teach you to be proactive, a soft skill that’s essential to DevOps. But you could also learn on the job, at the right organisation.

There are many courses you can take to hone your technical skills – Learning the CI/CD Pipeline in tools like GitLab, or learning to use Docker (the most popular runtime environment for containers).

The hard skills can all be taught.

The thing you really need for DevOps is a set of soft skills; and some people think you can’t learn those.

We beg to differ.

Soft skills – can they be learned?

Understanding the DevOps culture is key to your success. DevOps culture is pinned on transparency and open communication – and this is why DevOps isn’t for everyone. Some people just work best solo, or are set in their ways. And that’s fine, too! You do you.

The fact is that soft skills are harder to learn. Some say they are unlearnable, but we think that’s bunk. If you really, really want to make it in DevOps, you’ll do it. And humans learn best by doing and practising.

To hone your soft skills for DevOps, focus on developing the following – and train yourself to build these skills.

Prioritise communication and collaboration

Learn how to write clearly, effectively, and mindfully. Learn how to speak to others as your equals, and expect mutual respect.

If working with others is something you struggle with – don’t be ashamed! It’s a challenge for lots of people, most of us are just better at hiding it. Instead of shying away, try to apply collaboration skills in low-stakes environments, like gaming. Ease yourself out of your comfort zone.

Be proactive

This is the number one soft skill for anyone who wants to become a DevOps engineer.

The good news? If you’ve set yourself the goal of becoming a DevOps engineer, and started learning how all by yourself, then you are by definition a proactive person. You simply took the initiative to do what needed to be done, and here you are. Even just by reading this article, you’ve made a step to better yourself and become who you want to be.

The trick now is to carry on – and never stop.

If you can keep going, you’ll certainly figure out how to become a DevOps engineer. Try not to forget us when you do…

ClearHub – the home of DevOps professionals

ClearHub specialises in placing and sourcing freelance DevOps engineers – vetted, skills-checked and ready to work. Join us as a contractor, or hire your ideal candidate. To get started, call +44 (0) 2381 157811 or send your message to info@clearhub.tech.