JFK said it best...
"Ask not what your company can do for you... but what you can do for your company"... oh wait, that was country, not company.
I employed thousands of people over my career and interviewed several thousand people during that time frame. I increasingly put greater emphasis on what people did before they applied to work at the company, then the "credentials" on their resume.
If they were college educated, ideally, they worked at least part-time or over the summer at a stressful low paying job like a fast-food restaurant or some other minimum wage job working with other people. These low paying jobs generally involve hard work and toughen people to the real world. People are expendable, so no one cuts you any slack if you don't become part of the team (like boot camp in the military or training camp in sports), they don't need you.
This employee sounds like, the person was not ready for a real job, the person is still learning how to be an employee. That is not to say the company could not do a better job hiring or developing new employees. I used to track turnover at the manager level. Too much turnover by one manager was a sign, we had a leadership issue with that manager. But more often than not, we had an employee issue with the hire.
When counseling young people, I often warn them that money is the least important aspect of a job when it comes to job satisfaction. Money is important when it comes to lifestyle. But your pay influences mainly what your life is like away from work.
Who your boss is, what you will be doing, and who your peers are impact your life at the job. Very few employees focus on this when interviewing. I actually had to tell prospective employees to stop selling me on whether they are the right person for a job.
I could figure out if they had the skills to a job or not based on talking to them and spending around 3 minutes looking at their resume. Given that they were already screened for credentials by HR before they got to me, my goal was to figure out what they were looking for in a job... the problem is that most prospective hires lie and tell you what they think you want to hear and those that don't lie show how little they understand about working.
One of the more successful hiring practices is to arrange for a potential hire to meet a group of employees and simply talk with them about their jobs. What do they like about their job and what do they hate about it? What is the job really like?
I would encourage our employees to be honest, brutally so. It is cheaper to tie up three or four employees for an hour or two talking to a prospect, then making a bad hire, because the person had a totally different view of reality.
Also, if employees are part of the hiring process, they take a bit more ownership over the success of the "new person" and that can help. If the new person has an attitude problem, the employees are more likely to figure that out. Future peers are a lot tougher whether someone will fit in the department than a hiring manager.
