Hiring, Firing, and Learning in the Medtech Industry

The heart and brains of any company are the employees from the top to the bottom of its organization chart. Each person within the company has some semblance of authority and responsibility to make decisions that impact product quality and organizational longevity. From an employer’s perspective, it’s important to have functional hiring, disciplining, and firing practices. 

In my Due Process column in the October issue of MPO, I discussed the importance of training processes, including proving effectiveness, but the starting point for an effective training process is an effective hiring process. Hiring the right person for the right position is critical for departmental, product, and organizational success. 

Many managers may go straight to creating a job posting. However, it’s important to have a structured process for job posting in order to avoid assumptions, omissions, and errors. While there are no regulations relating directly to that process, the most effective I’ve seen in my years of management and auditing include:

• List all responsibilities and desires. This is the brainstorming stage of the hiring process, so the list should be extensive and might not include everything that will end up in the job description or job posting. Examples: reviewing and approving procedures, evaluating drawings and specifications for manufacturability, using manual inspection tools, performing failure analysis, determining the disposition of nonconforming products, mentoring new hires, getting along with difficult employees, improving the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality in the department, etc.
• Create a job description. This document generally contains hard skills rather than soft skills or personality preferences. As discussed in the October MPO column about training, it will become the foundation for training plans and disciplinary actions I will discuss later. Some job descriptions list educational or certification requirements; be careful that promising employees or candidates aren’t excluded because they lack a certification they can obtain during employment. 
• Create a job posting. Use the job description to create the meat of the job posting and add information about the company, benefits, etc. The best job descriptions will attract dozens of potential candidates and won’t be written in a way that excludes those with extensive experience in lieu of education or certification. Think carefully about actual requirements (must-haves) versus preferences (nice-to-haves). 

From a legal perspective, none of these documents can include directly exclusionary language like “young” or “female.” While language like “experienced” is acceptable, it shouldn’t be used in a way that blatantly prevents younger or older, qualified people from being hired. Also, interviewers shouldn’t make references to race, weight, appearance, etc. in their notes during interviews.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) in order to screen and eliminate potential candidates is becoming more common by the day but some AI algorithms are showing bias, which creators certainly didn’t intend to happen. As Hatim Rahman discusses in “Is AI making it harder for workers to find jobs?”¹ these systems can often cause bias against disabled, international, female, and vulnerable job seekers. To combat the bias that machine learning inadvertently creates, employees in hiring roles should be aware of their responsibilities related to this bias during the hiring process. 

HireVue is an AI-based hiring service that claims to decrease time to hire by 90%, cut hiring process costs by 50%, and grow diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring by 16%. These advertised statistics are appealing but the luster of AI-based hiring practices is waning. As discussed in a Forbes article,² Amazon tripped over a major stumbling block with its AI-driven hiring model: “a propensity to favor male candidates for technical roles.” AI tools learn from the data provided, meaning that it can perpetuate historical and current human bias. 

In response, the U.S. Department of Labor released the “AI & Inclusive Hiring Framework”³ to make “AI-enabled hiring tools more inclusive and accessible for disabled job seekers.” Hopefully, the implementation of this framework will help reduce future discrimination, but we should be careful about relying on this technology in the present. 

My company recently went through a hiring process. We narrowed a pool of about 150 applicants down to five for an interview. We hired the candidate with the least industry experience because she was enthusiastic about the opportunity, had the educational background, and had completed her master’s degree while raising four small children. 

We understood that anyone with the drive and ability to juggle multiple priorities would be perfect for the role—and we were right. An AI-driven hiring algorithm would have likely eliminated her as a potential candidate and this would have been a huge loss for our organization.

Hire a person, not a resume. The application (resume) review process can slash the number of potential candidates based on experience and education. However, interviews are the most important step in hiring. In my experience, most firings occur due to personality—not ability—so finding the right fit for your organization should be taken seriously. 

Resumehead discusses⁴ the top reasons for getting fired: unprofessional conduct, insubordination, poor performance, attendance and punctuality issues, violation of company policy, poor communication, dishonesty, workplace conflict, personal issues, and non-compliance with laws or regulations. The vast majority of these are related to soft skills and temperament, which are not obvious in a resume. 

A successful interview requires preparation from both parties. Indeed recommends that the interviewer prepare a list of questions in advance, and include open-ended questions. Rehashing information that is already present in a resume won’t provide any insights into what kind of person or employee the interviewee is. As Harvard Business Review points out,⁵ asking about relevant, real-life scenarios to reveal how candidates think allows the interviewer insight into whether or not the candidate can handle the job’s typical activities. 

It’s then the interviewer’s job to assess whether the candidate will be a good fit for both the job and the organization. 

Indeed offers advice for creating performance improvement plans (PIP): describe why the PIP is needed, identify the problem(s), create measurable objectives, come up with a schedule, and state the consequences. 

The theory and practice of PIPs can be valuable, but they can sometimes be difficult in practice. As I already discussed, most firings happen because of a disconnect between expectation and reality of an employee’s personality instead of their work product. 

Unfortunately, the majority of performance improvement plans I’ve seen focus on work products because it’s socially and legally difficult to address personality differences. Human resources and legal departments certainly don’t want to see an employee written up because “no one likes you.” 

Legal sensitivities about personality conflict can be cited as a reason for termination, so it is critical to involve human resources in your organization’s verbal and written warnings processes for inappropriate conduct. I remember a coworker who once bragged about being “quick to fire” because he believed an employee could never return to his good graces after a conflict or disappointment. 

This is short-sighted; it should always be our goal that when employees leave the company, they reminisce about their time with us as one of learning and growth. Although developing, implementing, and monitoring the PIP might be inconvenient and uncomfortable, we owe it to our employees to help them succeed. 

Regardless of the reason for an employee’s departure, never skip exit interviews. Ideally, a neutral party in a different department should conduct these interviews in order that the process can be impartial. 

An exit interview should be a lesson about how the organization could have handled a given situation better. As with any breakup, there are opportunities for both parties to explore mistakes or missed opportunities. 

As seen in another Harvard Business Review article,⁶ “In today’s knowledge economy, skilled employees are the asset that drives organizational success. Thus, companies must learn from them—why they stay, why they leave, and how the organization needs to change. A thoughtful exit interview (EI) process can create a constant flow of feedback on all three fronts.” 

In the same article, we learn the overall goals for an exit interview process are to uncover issues related to human resources, understand employees’ perceptions of the work, gain insight into managerial leadership, discover competing organizations’ salary and benefits, foster innovation and improvement, and create lifelong advocates for the organization. 

It’s natural to reject criticism from a departing employee, especially one being fired. We must all learn to set ego and hurt feelings aside for the good of ourselves and our organizations. 

The loss of an employee may feel like an organizational failure—instead, try interpreting it as a valuable learning experience.

References

¹ bit.ly/mpodueprocess11241 

² bit.ly/mpodueprocess11243

³ bit.ly/mpodueprocess11242

⁴ bit.ly/mpodueprocess11244

⁵ bit.ly/mpodueprocess11245

⁶ bit.ly/mpodueprocess11246

Meredith P. Vanderbilt is an internationally known medical device regulatory affairs consultant unafraid to communicate directly and honestly with regulatory bodies and clients about strategies and submissions to provide compliant and high-quality devices to the market.