Deliberate thought and planning to determine which hires you really need to enable success.Unstructured interviews and hiring processes riddled with bias.Prioritization of quantity and speed over quality.Sending new interviewers into the wild with no training and little regard for a common understanding of what good looks like.So, it’s time to stop the slapdash hiring. When you were on a rapidly rising tide, it may have been okay that some sub-par players would slip through the cracks. We’re already seeing the unfortunate aftermath of the haphazard, short-sighted hiring practices of the past decade resulting in layoffs at a slew of high-profile companies and many other companies dropping forecasted headcount growth by 30-50%.ĭisorganized, inconsistent, and low-quality hiring processes may have gotten companies through periods of hyper growth, but they won’t fly in this new world because they’re unsustainable and setting teams up for failure. The current situation has revealed that one of the key areas in need of transformation is hiring. In particular, leaders will need to shift their mindset towards hiring for quality in order to help their organizations thrive as they encounter a new set of challenges. What’s clear is that current market conditions mean that the days of growth at all costs-and hiring with reckless abandon to fuel that unsustainable, short term growth-are a relic of the past.Īs with any tumultuous time, this is a moment where companies will be forced to take a critical look at their established way of doing business, and the ones who adopt more thoughtful, efficient processes in response will continue to thrive. Until it isn’t.By this point, it’s been well established that we’re entering a new economic reality: Rising interest rates, sky-high inflation, and geopolitical uncertainties have put an end to more than a decade of unrestrained growth across the tech industry. She slapdashed her way to Mars and knew all along there was no Emergency Room for when it all broke on that cold, red planet. All I’ll say is that Jo Jo McRocket had bat-shit belief.Īnd we will never see that again. It’s hard to comprehend how she did it, or what made her think she could do it. They just say “that is so Jo Jo” or “you are totally Jo Jo.” In fact, folks don’t say “batshit crazy” anymore. Though in public they tow the “batshit crazy Jo Jo” line. In private, I think the government agents and engineers investigating the launch are in awe of her. Jo Jo’s conquest of Mars took them by surprise. NASA hasn’t said how it was possible either. But I have no idea how she converted a WWII submarine into a vehicle capable of getting her to Mars. I can drive out the thirty miles from Pilot Rock to the ranch she bought in her twenties, and see the mag-lev railgun she secretly built over two decades. Only she knows how it finally came together. And she got broke a lot along the way, physically, emotionally, financially. She’d have to slapdash her dream together, let it rip and pick up again and again whenever it broke. Jo Jo knew that to be first to Mars, to cut through all the naysaying, she’d have to be a bit bat-shit crazy. “Slap it together fast and get ready to dash to the Emergency Room.” Unless we slapdash it.” When I looked at her funny, she looked at me seriously.

“We’re never going to see something like that in Pilot Rock. Maybe the best way to convey her approach to conquering Mars is something she told me when we were in junior high and the new mag-lev superloop opened between Portland and Seattle. Jo Jo had the curiosity of a scientist, the discipline of an engineer and the humor of an undertaker. The building up to blasting off is easier to track. It’s hard to say when she went from dreaming to actually scheming. How’d she manage it? No one really knows except it took all her forty-two years to get it done. Even if it was a submarine she bought at a salvage auction and had trucked hundreds of miles inland from a navy shipyard near Seattle.

Pilot Rock is not a place that necessarily inspires a lot of dreams, except maybe getting out of our one-dog town. When we were growing up there, and she was simply my neighbor, Josie Kerr, how could she even imagine this batshit crazy idea?

I mean, we were from the nowhere town of Pilot Rock in the nowhere vastness of eastern Oregon. It’s still incomprehensible that Jo Jo made it to Mars. But the dreamer who did it, who actually batshit did it, wasn’t a regular Joe. You’re right if that sounds batshit crazy. I mean, who in their right mind would believe you could launch yourself to Mars on a mag-lev railgun in a salvaged WWII submarine? Blasting to the moon in a tin can built with slide rules. Clawing up Everest in tweed jackets with brittle hemp ropes. But, of course, that’s how it has always been done.

Slapdash mean