It’s tough living under a significant mistake, especially when one of your new hires doesn’t work out. You made your bed, tossed and turned in it for a time, all while slowly realizing you might need to buy a new mattress. After much lost sleep, you’re ready to admit you made a bad hire. But how can you recover and move on with the least damage?

Prepare to:

• Have an uncomfortable conversation. There’s no easy way to tell a new hire they aren’t working out. You hung in and hoped for the best, and now it’s time to be direct—kind and respectful, but direct—about their performance issues. Identify what’s going well and where the employee will need to make adjustments. Express your concerns, solicit the employee’s input, and see where you might work out a solution. This difficult conversation may turn into a welcomed opportunity to problem-solve together. After all, your employee might recognize the same problems you do, and might be sweating under the pressure to keep up.
• Explore more appropriate in-house opportunities. Is your new hire exhibiting unexpected behavior or feedback? Are they bored or withdrawn? Are their skills not matching what you’d expected for this position? Start with that direct conversation where you offer and solicit feedback. If an otherwise quality employee is a fit for the company but a mismatch for their current job duties, see if you can train them up to speed, give them duties more in their wheelhouse, or reassign them to a different role or department that better suits their skills and goals.
• Do a cost-benefit analysis. If it’s not practical or helpful to bolster the employee’s skills or move them to another opportunity, consider the current and future cost of hanging on to this hire. We all know that hiring and onboarding a replacement employee is a significant investment, but is it more or less costly, in terms of long-term productivity and morale, to keep an underperformer? Which is your company and your team able to afford right now?
• Set up a graceful exit. If there is no way to save the working relationship, see what you can do to make the exit as graceful as possible. If you’ve done your due diligence and given regular feedback, and especially if the employee has shared your concerns, the exit should not come as a surprise. In the case of an unsuccessful, mismatched employee (and not one that has misrepresented their skills or demonstrated unethical or problematic behavior), consider whether your company can offer a severance or outplacement services. While these services are generally reserved for long-term employees, they show good faith to the exiting employee and their coworkers, they help everyone move on more quickly and peacefully, and this effort shows the company taking accountability for making a bad hire.

When you make a bad hire, it’s hard on all the parties involved. So do your best to admit the mistake and quickly make things right, including uncovering what went wrong. You don’t want to repeat the same mistakes!