You Need To Hire Some "Wrong People"

"Red flags" disqualify all your applicants. If you let them.

The Insect Detection Specialist

California agricultural output totaled $61.2 billion in 2024¹. It’s a vital industry continually threatened by invasive pests, resulting in the unusual job of “insect detection specialist.” These folks crisscross assigned areas in pickup trucks all over California, placing insect traps in trees and bushes and collecting them a couple of weeks later, scouring the traps for invasive species.

John, someone I know well, did this work until he left California in 2005. When he returned in 2016 he expected to be rehired quickly. Unfortunately everyone he knew had left the department, and managers had been stripped of all hiring authority, which was handed over to HR.

HR ignored John’s 98% county quality record and the State of California’s 96.7% rating of his work. Their only interest was whether he’d be a “people person” who socialized well with colleagues. In doing so they abandoned any hope of finding the right people for the job, and their strategy focused on the wrong candidates.

Insect detection specialist is an exacting job. Specialists hand-draw the property where each trap is placed, noting the species of tree or plant and nearby species. Inspectors must find the traps from drawings alone. Processes must be precise, and records meticulous.

“Normal” people don’t post 98% quality score in this environment. Pedantic, exacting people do. John’s precision, not social skill, was exactly what the role needed – until HR started deciding who gets hired.

Is it important that colleagues get along? Not when the job entails 20 minutes in the office and 7.5 hours per day alone in a truck. If you hire for those 20 minutes with no regard for the skills required for the real job, your hiring is off target.

In jobs with constant colleague or client contact, John would be the wrong choice. HR couldn’t see when the “wrong choice” was exactly who they needed.

What Does Somebody Have To Do To Get A Job Around Here?

That’s the title of a book by former HR executive Cynthia Shapiro. It’s a dispiriting tour of how immoral, often illegal, and frequently ineffective today’s corporate hiring is.

It also explains why John didn’t get hired:

The person or people interviewing you won’t be looking for reasons to make you an offer. They will be actively looking for reasons to show you the door. Companies simply have too much at stake every time they hire someone. So, instead of looking for the best candidates, they will be much more concerned with actively looking for any red flags or danger signs that this hire may not work out.²

That may sound reasonable, until you see the real motivation:

Because a hiring manager’s job is on the line with every recommendation for hire, the safest bet is the one who will receive the offer, not necessarily the one with the best qualifications.³

The result is a system designed, in John’s extreme case, to shield decision-makers from blame. There are many jobs that are best performed, or performed at all, by people who are not “the safest bet.” If you systematically exclude them, your future is inadequate people producing tepid results.

The Federal Government Contractor

I’ve been a buyer for federal contractors for over a decade. Although we aren’t technically governed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the FAR underpins our rules, and it’s 1,200 pages. There’s a lot of regulation to follow and document.

A $10 million purchase requires about 100 pages of internal documentation plus 500 pages of supplier proposals. Dates, bidder information, analyses, statuses, prices, terms; dozens of data points exist in multiple places, all requiring manual updates when one changes. From planning to award can take a year. When I update data I must know where else it appears or is referenced, in sections I wrote months earlier.

Most people cannot track this web of details. I’m mildly obsessive and it challenges me. (I’m bragging – obsessive is practically a mandatory quality to do my job well). Many “normal” colleagues struggle with this – the one part that counts at audit time. A great contract is worthless if it isn’t precisely documented because it won’t pass federal audit.

Job ads say they want a “detail oriented” person. That’s a softer way to say obsessive. How obsessive do you need? Five errors per file, two, or none? If you’re looking for someone who can routinely turn out perfect files, you are looking for obsessive.

Audits determine your ability to earn revenue. You want obsessive. You need the rare ability created by habitual thought patterns and neural mechanisms that hones in instinctively on the inconsistencies and data mismatches scattered across 100 pages of documents.

My job, like John’s, is best performed by the “unsafe bet,” in my case someone likely to exhibit an obsessive red flag.

Who Are These People With No Red Flags?

Here’s more from Cynthia Shapiro on the red flags that disqualify John, me, and in reality, everyone:

[Hiring managers] are trained to scrutinize everything so closely that they read “potential danger” into everything they see and hear from an applicant…So any red flag raised, whether accidental or even inaccurate, will stop the process immediately.⁴

How is this called “training”? Training to be paranoid and make bad hiring decisions – sure.

Who among us has no “red flags” in our personality, philosophy, or history? It’s part of the human condition. A manager or HR “professional” who tosses an applicant at the first hint of red has accomplished nothing. Every applicant has multiple red flags. Failing to notice one doesn’t make an applicant better.

In fact, the “perfect” candidate may be the biggest red flag – perfection can be a sign of a performance, not substance. There is no perfect, and therefore the perfect applicant is hiding things that you missed.

And you just rejected the person honest enough to let you see something real.

What Should You Do?

One simple thing: when you see a red flag, ask about it, gently and curiously. Get context. Decide whether there’s an actual risk. Usually “there is no there there.”

That “imperfect” person could be ideal for the job, a future leader, and a long-term asset. They’re just as likely as the supposedly flag-free candidate to be any of these things. Don’t discard them based on a story you invented about who they are. The “red flag” you noticed is as normal, natural and necessary as breathing.

---

¹ https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics, as of November 6, 2025

² Shapiro, Cynthia. What Does Somebody Have To Do To Get A Job Around Here? St. Martin’s Press, 2008, ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37334-4. pg 10

³ Ibid, pg 11

⁴ Ibid, pg 18