628: Recovering from a Bad Hire
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What happens when the excitement of growing your team turns into the disappointment of a bad hire? In this episode, we explore why failed hires sting so deeply, from the personal investment of time and trust to the disruption it causes clients, pets, and team morale. We share how rushing to replace too quickly can compound mistakes, while ignoring red flags or skipping feedback loops leaves you vulnerable to repeat issues. While every bad hire feels discouraging, it doesn’t have to define your business or your leadership. By giving yourself space to grieve, reviewing the clues left behind, strengthening your hiring funnel, and communicating transparently with your team, you can recover with resilience and make smarter, more confident hires in the future.
Main topics:
Why bad hires feel personal
Client and team disruption
Review process for red flags
Improve hiring funnel steps
Transparent team communication plan
Main takeaway: “One bad hire doesn’t define you as a leader—it’s how you respond that matters.”
Every business owner will eventually face a hire that doesn’t work out. It feels discouraging, personal, and costly—but it isn’t the end of your story. The key is to pause, reflect, and look at what lessons you can take forward. Was it a process issue, a cultural mismatch, or a lack of support? By strengthening your systems and trusting your instincts, you come back wiser and more confident. Remember, leadership isn’t about being perfect—it’s about learning, adapting, and continuing to build a team that serves pets and people well.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Bad hire, hiring process, pet care business, team morale, employee training, job description, cultural fit, hiring funnel, communication, leadership, onboarding, feedback loops, business impact, resilience, lessons learned
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:00
Collin, Hi, I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the hosts of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you so much for joining us today. We would like to thank pet sitters associates as well for sponsoring to this episode and our executive producers on Patreon. Those are people who listen, love the show. Want to give back? If that sounds like you too, you can go to pet sitter, confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help. Hiring is one of the hardest parts of running a pet care business. You are trusting someone, not only with the pets in your care, but also with the reputation you have worked so hard to build, and sometimes it goes wrong. You try your best, you hire them, you tell them all of your policies and procedures, but it just doesn't work out. In the end, you make a hire and it doesn't work. Maybe they weren't a good fit, maybe they violated your trust, or maybe it just didn't click. The vibes just weren't there for whatever reason. But the aftermath of a bad hire can feel super discouraging. It can feel overwhelming, and truthfully, a little bit personal.
Collin 01:00
Yeah, yeah. We pour ourselves into every person who comes into the business you do, you go through a long in depth process of asking questions, getting to know the person, multi stages in your hiring funnel to make sure that this is going to be a good fit. And then when it doesn't, we can start to question and ask, okay, maybe, maybe I did a bad job. Maybe it's me who my picker was broken for that particular day, or maybe I just don't know what I need, and it did that personal attack can sometimes feel like of a retaliation against us as a person.
Meghan 01:31
We have to remind ourselves that there is good news. A bad hire is not the end of our business, thank goodness. In fact, to give you one of the most powerful teachers that we would have we learn the lessons from it. So that's what we're going to talk about on this episode, How To recover from a bad hire, the steps to take, the communication with your team that you need to have, and how to grieve the loss. But more than any of that you get to set yourself up for a stronger, more confident hire. In the future, we see a lot of dog walking and pet sitting business owners and Facebook groups saying I tried to hire someone three years ago, and it bit me in the butt, and I never want to do that again. It was just it was a terrible experience. But we're here to tell you that one wrong hire, one bad hire, does not have to spoil the whole bunch. You can recover from it. First, you have to acknowledge why it is so painful, because, again, it feels personal. You invested in this person, the hours, the days, the training, the showing them stuff in a client's house, or how to leash up a dog. You believed in them, and when it doesn't work, it feels like a failure, some sort of judgment coming upon
Collin 02:34
you. It's that belief in them because you don't bring people on because you think they're going to fail. You don't bring people on because you think they're going to be a bad fit. You don't bring people on because you don't like them. All three of those things are must be true in order for you to move forward with that. A lot of times we'll say, Hey, do I feel like I would let this person into my house to care for my pets? That's a very personal decision that we make and a connection that we have with them, and especially as you go through all the steps of your procedure and your process, you do grow a connection with them. You do start a relationship with them as an employer and employee. As you build that trust, as you build that familiarity with who they are, you learn about their past, you learn about their family, their likes, their dislikes, you learn about who they are as a person, and then right whenever they leave for whatever reason, it doesn't have to be under bad circumstances. It could just be that they got another job, or they're going back to school, or they had a life event change where they have to go home and care for a parent, or their kid is sick now and they need to stay at home and be with them. It can still feel like this breach of trust that you had with that person.
Meghan 03:40
Well, I guess that's a good point, because we are using the term bad hire, and that's negative. That means something bad happened. But it may not necessarily be the case.
Collin 03:48
Yeah, it could just be that it just didn't work out. It wasn't for them, but we're going to say it's a bad hire because it didn't continue. It didn't go the way we thought it was going to go. It didn't work out as we had hoped,
Meghan 04:01
whatever the reason is, it still disrupts the business. Clients may notice, especially if you operate on a one for one model, one pet sitter to one client, clients are going to notice the work gets shuffled around. Other employees have to pick up the slack, or you have to then go do double the amount of visits because you are offloading some to the other person. Well,
Collin 04:19
a big thing, you hire your first person, or maybe it's your second, or you're just bringing people onto the team, and you make that big social media splash, or you send it out in a bunch of emails, or you do this big, long introduction to all of your clients to let them know that you're hiring, expanding why it's good, and all the benefits that that brings. And you grow that team, and then that person isn't there in a week or in a couple months. It can feel like you've let your clients down, that you've lied to them, that it wasn't as good or beautiful as you had hoped it would be. And then the worry there is, is that the client starts to question, you know, you can certainly start to go, oh, are the clients going to question me? Are the clients going to have concerns about my picks, about my direction for the company? Are they going to start to wonder if everything. Is stable and Okay? And then, yeah, it gets disrupted because you have to shuffle things around. You don't hire somebody because you have nothing to do. You hire because you want to give them work as you offload work for them. Usually that means that you get work off of your plate. But then what do we do? We fill it with other stuff, or we have other team members that fill with other stuff, and it fills back up. And then for one person to drop out all of a sudden, you've got to reshuffle the deck. You have to stop what you were doing, move away from the direction that you had hoped for, and go back to something that you were doing previously.
Meghan 05:29
It can really shake your confidence. You may question your ability to lead or evaluate people, or, like you said, your picker is off, and then it costs you money, recruiting, training, onboarding, the gear that they need. It all adds up, and it all has a price tag. We need to recognize that the weight of a bad hire matters. It's not just business. It impacts you personally and as a business, it impacts your team. It impacts your clients and the pets. If the pets have grown to love Sandy every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, at 2pm Well, then they're gonna have to get adjusted to somebody else.
Collin 06:03
Yep. And that's all a process, and that costs time and is financial resources of if you pay for training, you know, again, pay for good training, make sure that they're counting those hours. But as you go through this process, you have to make sure that you give yourself space. I know one of the biggest mistakes that business owners that we can make after a bad hire is immediately rushing into the new one. Hello. This sounds like a lot of dating advice, right? If you have a bad breakup, make sure that you give yourself some space to understand what's going on. You need time to process. And this is important because many times again, because it disrupts the business, because it was so costly, because it feels personal, we want to go right back into
Meghan 06:43
it. Yeah? We want to jump the gun, yeah? Because again, if we're offloading some of our work to reduce it, because we're trying, we're growing at a rapid pace. I can't now take on the work of two people, so I immediately have to turn around and hire again.
Collin 06:57
And then what happens is that we don't give ourselves that space. We don't give our time to we don't give ourselves time to grieve and really process and understand what's going on and and yes, this is a grief process. We are going to mourn the loss of this hire. It is grieving because you lost the future that you thought you'd have with that employee. I know that sounds really pie in the sky, really kind of it might sound like over romanticizing, but you hired out of hope. You hired this person out of a dream and out of vision that you had for the way your business was going to look. And when that person stopped showing up, when that person says no, and when things don't work out, all of those hopes and dreams come crashing down on you, and you have to sit there and go the future that I had hoped for is not there anymore. And I I really have to figure out what to do with that. But
Meghan 07:48
it's important to give yourself permission to take a step back, to take a breath, to say that was hard I did not enjoy, that it's okay that I'm disappointed. Now this doesn't mean stalling forever again. A lot of times, pet sitters hire that first person and they say, ah, that that didn't work out, and I don't want to do it again. I'm not not interested in managing people or getting in that boat. It was too hard,
Collin 08:11
yeah, well, or it's, it was too personal. I was too hurt by this. It was too much of a personal attack, and I didn't feel good by that. And this is where having good systems and boundaries in place good roles defined for you as a person of I mean, Megan, you and I have certainly felt this. So we bring somebody on, we're really excited how things are going, and there's a sudden change in their availability, and they can't work where the way we thought they'd want their work. And then they end up having to leave the company, and we have to sit there and go, gah, okay, okay. And it's always that we let the emotions happen, we process them, and then we have to put our business visor back on and put our business hat back on and say, okay, as a business, what's the next move here? And I can go, Look, I'm still hurting, I'm I'm grieving this process. I'm going to give myself time, but I need to get to a point where I, as a business, know that the next move is I'm not stalling forever. I'm not allowing my personal emotions to prevent my business from going the direction where it needs to go.
Meghan 09:15
So again, acknowledging the feelings and then honoring your emotions before you dive back into hiring again, into those interviews, into those questions. Every bad hire leaves clues. The key is to identify them. What lessons have you learned? First, you need to look at the process. What process do you have? Do you even have a process? Or was this kind of haphazardly thrown together? Where did things break down? Was it in the job description? Was it in the interview questions? Was it the trial period? Were you checking in with them along the way, asking them for their feedback and what they thought of the process? Also figure out if there were any red flags that you kind of just ignored or swept under the rug and thought that's not that big of a deal. Did you ignore your gut feeling? Did you kind of bend the rules because you were desperate? For help. If we're so slammed and we've got 20 visits a day and we're just pulling our hair out or we need to take a day off, it can feel like we have to hire and so we ignore some of the bad things and just say, Okay, you are breathing. You're in my company. Let's go.
Collin 10:14
And then when you have clarity after the person is gone, you go back and you review their answers. You review the comments that you made during the interview, and sometimes I'm gonna, I'm gonna say it. A lot of times you'll go, Ah, yeah, there it is.
Meghan 10:30
That was the one I really should have paid attention
Collin 10:32
to that. That was the one question. See how they answer that this all fits together. And then that is part of this, this process. Again, bad hires leave clues, but you don't know those clues unless you do reviews. You've got to go back and look at these and go because otherwise we're just always basing it out of recency bias and going, Oh man, that was so bad, because they blah, blah, blah, blah, and they were so combative and they were whatever. But there were earlier signs, I guarantee it something should have clued you into what was coming. And so go back and look, and that's
Meghan 11:04
why it's so important to do your homework in the beginning and write down people's answers that they say, if it's not written questions and they're just orally telling you through a phone interview or an in person, you have to write everything down, both the good and the bad. And that continues when you bring them on as an employee and you check in with them, write everything down so you know what has happened? Because we all have that recency bias of, oh, well, I know the past week was bad, so maybe that was the reason why they quit, but it could have been something that happened three months ago and you weren't even aware of it because you didn't write it down, so you can't remember
Collin 11:34
it. Yeah, it was just an offhand comment that they made, or something happened in passing, and it at the time piqued your interest, but you were so busy, you were so slammed, that you just kept moving on, and you ignored it. And so this speaks volumes. I'm really glad you brought that up. Megan of take notes, document, document, document. It's not just that we document because we're again, we're having the mindset of an employer. Now, okay, so I'm an employer. I have to manage people. That means I've got to be a life coach. I've got to encourage them. I've got to admonish them. When that things come up, you only do that when you know what's going on and you understand the history of where things have come so, if nothing else, document everything through your hiring process as much as you can,
Meghan 12:16
and then also look at the culture fit. Were they just not going to fit into how you manage or how you operate your business. You know skills are teachable, the attitude, the reliability and the values are not if you ultimately hired somebody that does not align with your fear free business, that's just not going to work out.
Collin 12:35
Yeah, oftentimes we hire for skill over fit in the company, and that is a hard line, because many times we are, we are given people apply, and they were a former dog trainer, or they were a technician, or they were also a pet sitter. They have all the skills right there. We look at them and we go, oh, this would be so easy to just slot right in. Oh, my goodness. Look how everything already fits, but they have a horrible attitude. Or you ask them that question, tell me what's, what's, what did you love most about your most recent job? And they have nothing good to say. Okay, that's a big sign. We've got to put all of our context clues again. There's no it's all context clues. But when you have somebody in front of you who's applying, and they appear to be a good fit, but they have a bad attitude, that is a bad hire every single time, and then you have to assess their level of support. Did they fail because of them, or did you not set them up with enough training, clarity and accountability? This is our reflection, where we now look inwardly and we say, did the higher go bad, go wrong because I didn't set proper expectations. Did I not tell them what an awesome day of visits look like, and they didn't know what they were shooting for? Did I not train them on the proper skills that they would need to go in and do visits? And then they felt frustrated and inadequate, and so they quit because of those things. If they quit, if they if it's a bad hire because it was on them, right? They lied to you, they withheld information. They did. You know, they were a bad fit all this stuff, but we always have to ask. And anytime these things happen, it's uncomfortable, but it's absolutely fundamental that we look back on ourselves and go, did I fail them? Was there something that I could have done? And in those moments where you do have an employee's leave, always ask them, What could I have done better if you again, have that kind of relationship, and if they're leaving on amicable terms? And asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, right? All of those things, but look back and say, What could I have done to set them up for success better?
Meghan 14:36
And then every lesson that you learn write it down from this hire. It's the roadmap for better hiring next time, it's only going to make you more successful. The next time bad hires can be a hard lesson, and another hard lesson is having the wrong insurance. All professionals should have specific pet business insurance. As a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member, but who's got your back for over 25 years, pet sitters, associate. Has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out, they make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at petset llc.com and as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. That's petsitllc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. This can feel very defeating when it's your first hire, but if it's not, it's probably something that you should communicate in some way to your team, because if you have a team, a bad hire impacts them too. They may feel frustrated or burned or even resentful if you had other teammates shadowing and training that person, and then all of a sudden they're not there one day. Well, that does kind of have to be explained. The best thing that you can do is be transparent. You don't need to share private details, especially if something went south or went bad. But an overarching statement does need to be made, yeah,
Collin 15:50
say something like, Hey, this hire didn't work out. This person didn't work out. Here's what we're going to do to cover visits. In the meantime, you have to come with a plan. When there's a disruption like this, if you just kind of throw up your hands and say, Well, I don't know. Well, that's not good enough. This is where leadership really steps in. And you have to guide your team. You have to help boost their morale, not by just, you know, encourage them, like, Hey, we're really excited and papering over this instead, come with a concrete plan. You can come and say, Hey, this was, this was really tough. I'm really frustrated that this didn't work out. But it happened and it happened, and we're going to move on and we're going to be better for this. Or maybe you can say, Look, we, or I've learned some lessons, and I'm improving my process to make sure that this doesn't happen again. Or do you guys have any feedback for me to for somebody who's a good fit for the team so I know what to look for and involve them in the process, especially if you're a small, close knit team, the
Meghan 16:44
tempting thing can be to just sit there and complain about this person of I didn't they pulled the wool over my eyes. I didn't realize that they were going to do this. And this happened, and it just turns into a snowball bad session. And that's not what you want either, because team morale is going to plummet real fast when the other employees realize, well, they were taught the boss is talking bad about the employee that just left. I bet they're also talking bad about me,
Collin 17:08
right? And then a lot of questions start to swirl here. Being honest reinforces trust. Again. You do have limitations on what you can or cannot talk about from an employer's perspective, and you have to keep that in mind and always talk with a good HR person or an employment lawyer to understand this. You remember that your team, they don't they don't expect or demand perfection, but what they do look for is leadership, especially during tough times in the business.
Meghan 17:37
This is not all doom and gloom, though. Again, those lessons that you've learned, that you've written down bad hire often reveals where your systems need strengthening. You can take those lessons. You can take that strengthening and make things better with your hiring funnel. Again, if you don't even have one, well, now's the time to start. Do you only have two steps to it? But you really should have four. Add more filters up front. Have a clear job description, a specific application, questions, a multi step process, phone screening, in person, make it so there's they have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to get to the best of the best and be the best of the best in your company.
Collin 18:14
Yeah, and not just to have useless hoops. Obviously, they need to have purpose, and they need to be intentional. You're not just having people jump through flaming hoops because it's funny, right? They all need to be designed to get to where you are comfortable and are able to say yes to this person because they're a good fit for your people. And yes screening out is this person trainable? Okay, how do I get at those things? Is this person a good cultural fit for us? Okay, let me how do I screen on those things. Megan, you mentioned clear job descriptions. I know this is is truly in valuable because it not only sets the expectations coming into the company, but it provides you something to point back to throughout the entire time that they are with you. Of here's what you came on for. I'm not asking you anything different. It's all here, and it's been the same and consistent all the way through. Because when people have clarity, they're able to make really good decisions. And oftentimes we struggle with that clarity because it's messy in our minds. I don't know, how do I write down how to be an awesome pet sitter? Like, Oh, okay, let me figure this out. But really, what are your expectations? Again, that comes back to, what does it mean to have an amazing day as an employee of mine? Here are the things that I'm going to look for. Tell them that before they're on the team, so they know what they're signing up for.
Meghan 19:34
Maybe with your processes, you need a better trial period or a longer trial period. Extend that probationary period of okay, you have 60 days now. It's going to be 90 days where I'm going to evaluate what you're doing, how trainable and coachable you are during this time, and then maybe add some shadow shifts in here to truly assess it. Just because you let somebody go out on their own after week one doesn't mean you can't step back in and say. Hey, I've been noticing these things. Or let me just check in with you, and let's go for a walk here and there, or
Collin 20:06
have someone else from your team step in, even if you don't have a team lead or a daily manager or whatever. I'm sure if you have a team, you have a couple people that you're like, Oh man, this is they are really rock stars. With this, have the new hire, Shadow the rock star, and then get feedback from the rock star on the new hire to see where they're at, see what that fit is like, and see how they are gelling and whether they're on the right track that way. Again, you're getting external input. You're able to see the progress, and you're also able to track it as well.
Meghan 20:37
And you're building in those feedback loops that is so critical, regular check ins with your employees during onboarding, while they're being trained. Once they are released into the wild, this really catches issues early, or hopefully it does, and you'll be able to better say, Okay, well, I can understand why this person is acting this way, or is doing these things, because I have more touch points with them.
Collin 21:02
Yeah, I know when we first started building our team, we did not do this part. We did not do regular check ins with people that took us a little while into building our team before we went you know what new hires need to have weekly check ins, one on one with us, so that we can ask some very specific questions and get the feedback from them, because we were finding ourselves surprised at month two or at month three by things that we were going, Oh, we had no idea. You just didn't tell us, or we didn't think to ask. And so that's all part of the process now of we have set one on ones with everybody who comes on, and they are scheduled out far in advance, so people know that they're going to be there, and they know they're coming, and it's not surprising to anybody, because that way you get that connection with them, and it's an open forum for them to give feedback on the process itself as well. Don't forget that, Hey, you came into the company, you've, you're, seems like everything's going well, did I do a good job training you do you have the support that you need and get that feedback as well.
Meghan 22:04
There are very few people that are going to come to you of their own volition and say, Hey, you did a great job, boss, with onboarding me, I feel really prepared, or I could really use some help in this area with this thing. Not many people are going to do that, and the ones that are probably have some serious grievances, and it's not going to be a positive experience for you, so why don't you just nip that in the bud and hopefully prevent some of those really hard conversations by you inserting yourself into their lives on the
Collin 22:34
job that that is that is one of those things of, Okay, nope, you are my employee. I am going to you said that perfectly, I am going to insert myself into your life as an employee of mine to make sure that I am leading and managing you well. Because otherwise I don't know, and if I don't know, I don't know how to correct I don't know how to move forward. I don't know that there is an issue to do anything with, and I also don't know what's working. So whenever I have to go back to go back to the drawing board when something falls apart. I'm starting from nowhere, and I'm just making more stabs in the
Meghan 23:05
dark. Now these processes don't guarantee perfection, but they will hopefully reduce that risk and give you the confidence that you need to make better decisions, to keep hiring, to keep it, keep the funnel going. So
Collin 23:18
at this point, we've had the bad hire. They've left the company. We've given ourselves space and time to process everything. We've reflected and looked at some red flags, some cues. We're learning lessons and we're changing some processes about our company at this point. At some point, we've got to get back on the horse. We've got to try again.
Meghan 23:39
Like I mentioned at the beginning of this, the temptation is to say, Oh, that was a bad hire. I never want to do it again. I'm out. No, thank you. But if your goal is to have a team, you can't say, oh, I'll just do it all myself. Well, no, you can't do 40 visits in a day or 80 visits in a day. That that's not sustainable. It's not it's not even feasible. The healthier path is to approach hiring with more wisdom, not more fear, remembering those lessons that you learned then trusting your instincts. Because you have learned your process, you have refined it, you've gone over and over and and nitpicked it so that it is better ultimately, and remind yourself one bad hire doesn't define you as a leader. There have certainly been people that we've hired and they haven't even lasted one day. And we just wanted to pull our hair out and go, What is all of this for? Why are we doing this? Let's get off this hamster wheel and just go back to being solo.
Collin 24:32
Yeah, we've Yeah. I definitely feel as though I've laid on the ground and just questioned everything. And one thing that always pulls me through is looking at the team that we do have and going, but we brought them on, and they are rock stars, good eggs. They are so amazing. I am astonished by how kick butt our team is. And I look at them and I go, Well, we did it with them. We did something right. We did something right. So let's go back to the. Drawing board. Let's assess where this one went wrong, see where we can improve and keep moving forward. Because again, we have that vision. We have that goal for our company, and I am not going to let one misfit break everything and ruin everything. I have confidence in the fact that our processes do work and they do a really good job at screening out the bad eggs. It's not 100% but we're happy with where we are, and we can just move forward and keep going.
Meghan 25:29
So here's your challenge for this week, if you've had a bad hire, sit down and write out three lessons you have learned from the experience, even if it's been a long time ago. See if you can dredge back up the memories, even though they may not be the best, but see if there's any lessons that you can pull forward, then ask yourself, what one process could I put in place today to make the next hire stronger? Recovering from a bad hire is about resilience. It's about grieving the loss, learning the lesson, and then courageously stepping forward and doing it again, doing the hard thing, because the truth is, your business likely needs people. If you are doing dozens of visits a day, it needs people, and the right hire is out there. We so appreciate you listening today. If you would like to look us up on Facebook and Instagram, we are at Pet Sitter confessional, or you can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com We'd like to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring this episode and you for listening. We will talk with you next time bye. You.
