In 2003, I learned a valuable lesson about firing people.  Our company was growing and it was time for us to hire a full time office manager.  After placing ads, interviewing, and searching for about a month, we found what seemed to be a wonderful “Christian” lady to work for us.  Patty (not her real name) was a dedicated mother with a southern draw from the foothills of Tennessee who had been searching for an office job for months.  I was the answer to her prayers she told me as we hired her and I felt all warm and fuzzy inside.

Her resume was perfect and she told me that she had no problem with the software which she listed on her resume.  I felt like I had hit the jackpot when I hired her and waited with anticipation for the day I could hand over a bunch of tasks to her.  Freedom was coming to my schedule and I was excited!  Truth be told, I had no idea all the tasks that I would give her, I just knew that I would dump as much as I could on her so I could have some time off.  It didn’t take me long to realize what a BIG mistake I’d made.

When she started, I was so busy that I really couldn’t give her proper training.  So, I found some menial tasks for her to do.  Licking stamps, cleaning the office, and making a few calls.  She seemed like she would work out fine when I gave her these easy stuff, but I realized she had a lot of time to just sit there and be bored.  I decided that I would clear my schedule so I could spend some time training her on the items that I wanted her to do…keep in mind that by this time she had been working for us for a month.

As we sat in my office, I began showing her a few things in Microsoft Excel and then in Microsoft Word.  We’re not talking advanced stuff here… basically adding people to file and creating letters, sending emails, ETC.  I sent her on her way and fully expected that I’d see some progress and my stress level would go down because she’d be handling some of those daily tasks.  When I checked back in a week later, I found disaster.  Nothing was completed correctly and worse than that, I would need to go back and fix everything.  I came to quickly realize that PATTY didn’t know much about computers or how to use the Microsoft programs listed on her resume.  I actually found out that her entire resume was a lie and she didn’t know how to do anything on that list. Continue Reading…