If you were an economics major or understand the operational aspects of a margin account, you likely already know what a dead cat bounce is. For those that don’t we grabbed a clip from Wikipedia to explain.

“In economics, a dead cat bounce is a small, brief recovery in the price of a declining stock.[1] Derived from the idea that “even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height”, the phrase, which originated on Wall Street, is also popularly applied to any case where a subject experiences a brief resurgence during or following a severe decline.”

We are not just churn and burn recruiters rapidly firing off paper at the pace of a Gatling gun, we are talent evaluators assisting you with the selection of hiring top 5% talent. One of our own internal metrics happens to be, “if you chart this candidates career, is it their second wind or simply a dead cat bounce?”

You likely have made this mistake before, someone was killing it for years at one of your competitors and they took a down turn or maybe even were unemployed for a period of time. You may be thinking about picking them up cheap and go with your instinct that their industry experience could be useful. What you didn’t know is that although the candidate interviewed very well, they were a broken man \ woman. This could be one major event in their life or an accumulation of several factors such as divorce, bankruptcy, loss of competitive attitude or simply being burnt out.

So you hired this “rock star” on the cheap and you’re counting the days until you can let them go, so where did you go wrong?

You need a bad guy. It’s that simple. When you’re working with an executive search firm we can be the bad guy, but when you’re doing it internally you really need someone that can do it. Not just anyone can do this and we will tell you several rules that must be followed when doing this.

1. The bad guy cannot be the hiring manager. When onboarding intelligent people, if they feel the hiring manager is a pain to work for you can count them out or expect their salary demands to go higher.

2. The bad guy (or girl) must have the necessary business alchemy so they know what questions to press buttons on.

3. This person cannot accept politician answers. For example, if you ask how much they saved with their value engineering efforts in the global supply chain and they reply with “$2MM to $4MM”, you ask, which is it? $2MM or $4MM? And you keep your foot on the pedal until you figure out all the details on HOW they accomplished it.

4. Get out of the office! We are notorious for conducting interviews in coffee shops, at dinner, we even pack up the golf clubs and head to the driving range. Get candidates out of the boardroom setting where they know how they should act and put them in a social scene allowing them to be who they really are.

One last note, follow these interviewing processes all the time! You don’t need to follow these just for when you are vetting someone’s ability to come in and still be a star, you can use these principles to assist with making better hires every time.