Don’t Hire Your Friends

Hiring someone you already know and trust can feel like one of the safest decisions you can make as a business owner.

You know their character. You like them. You trust them. Maybe they need an opportunity. Maybe you think working together will be fun.

But friendship and employment are two very different relationships.

In this solo episode of The Equine Business Edge, Jamie Birch shares lessons learned from hiring friends throughout his career, including situations that cost money, damaged businesses, hurt company culture, lost clients, and permanently changed friendships.

The problem usually isn’t that your friend is a bad person.

The problem is that friendship changes the way we hire, manage, communicate, and hold people accountable.

Jamie explores why business owners often give friends opportunities they wouldn’t give another candidate, tolerate behavior they wouldn’t tolerate from another employee, and wait far too long to address problems because the personal relationship is always sitting underneath the professional one.

In this episode:

• Why trust and friendship are not the same thing as job fit
• How hiring someone because you want to help them can cloud your judgment
• Why friends often receive different expectations, freedoms, and accountability
• What happens when spouses, families, and social circles become intertwined with the employment relationship
• Why former business owners can sometimes struggle becoming employees
• How friendship can make difficult feedback even more difficult
• Why waiting too long to deal with a problem can hurt the rest of your team
• How a bad hire can affect clients, culture, revenue, and other employees
• Why even hiring an extremely talented friend can permanently change the friendship
• The danger of hiring people who are comfortable and familiar instead of people whose skills complement your own
• Why compassion is important — but compassion is not a hiring strategy

Jamie also shares two questions business owners should ask themselves before hiring a friend:

“If I met this person yesterday, would I still hire them for this job?”

And once they're working for you:

“Would I tolerate this from an employee who wasn't my friend?”

The larger lesson isn't that your friends are incapable of being great employees.

It's that a great friendship is incredibly valuable — and turning that friendship into an employer/employee relationship introduces compensation, performance expectations, authority, accountability, difficult conversations, and potentially the responsibility of firing someone you care about.

Sometimes the best way to protect a great friendship is simple:

Keep your friends as friends. Hire extraordinary people to work for your business.