How do you handle a terrible hire when you can't fire them?
Strict labor laws make it nearly impossible to fire underperforming or unskilled staff, forcing managers to absorb their workload or babysit basic tasks. This leaves supervisors overwhelmed, burning through money on wasted labor and ruined materials while trying to do two jobs at once.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1eating the cost of slow labor
- 2letting performance issues slide to focus on sales
- 3monitoring performance more closely and offering coaching before firing
- 4Doing both jobs and helping the underperforming employee daily
- 5Planning to ask the CEO for a pay raise to compensate for covering two jobs
- 6Stopping help and only performing one's own tasks
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“The issue is that this person basicly lied about his skills so im stuck with a hire that i have to help daily with even level 1 tickets.”source ↗
“As NIS2 came my workload has been off the charts and planning for next year i got told no straight away for another hire. In my country its's EXTREMLY hard to fire someone, even if they dont have the skills for the job.”source ↗
“So now im basicly doing the techs job and my own. I manage but its exhausting.”source ↗
“Yesterday, 4 hours into their 8 hr shift when I saw the horrible work she did, I teared up and told them to get out of my apartment. I was completely shocked that for 4 hours she sat there doing shitty work. So I basically just threw money away for paying her for nothing and also lost a bunch of ingredients.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 9Why is handling employee relations so overwhelming?
- 12Why can't employees ever use the self service portal?
- 3How to deal with an unqualified employee who is impossible to fire
- 4Why do employees lack initiative and need constant hand-holding?
- 6Landlords using cheap handymen and accordion drains
- 13How to deal with toxic leadership during company layoffs