The background is that I am working in a small company, small enough that there is only minimum HR support and each of us team leads needs to conduct our job posting, interview, even discussing the contract with the candidates.
The pain (but please don’t pity me because I still like my job) came because my team needed that extra headcount for certain tasks that without the correct experience and tenacity we as team leads are swamped with work.
The dilemma comes when the CVs started coming in and interviews were conducted.
There are really three kinds of candidates out there, the ones that we will not hire in a million years because of some red flags, and the ones that are too fresh to work and need a lot of (too much) guidance but are “affordable”, and the ones that are really capable and ready to contribute but are “expensive”.
To yield the best outcome (money no object) is to hire these very good people, but some of these are more experienced in the industry (than yours truly) and therefore the salary is higher, and that results in envy and unhappiness (?), but the freak alternative is to continue getting fresh people that will help very marginally in our projects.
Has anyone been in such situation? Is this sustainable? What can I do? Btw the situation is not one off, even one of my subordinates (supervisor level) is not always better paid than the operator and she also spoke out about it (she hired the operator) but the both of us don’t know how to handle this also…
Here are what netizens think:
- If you are on the panel to hire a subordinate, they should never get a salary higher than yours. That would be a conflict of interest. If you are on the panel then you would be stupid to hire someone better than you (unless you owned the company) lest they soon take over your job. It’s up to you to train newbies to the level where you don’t have to be doing majority of the work as team leaders. It’s ridiculous for new operators to earn more than their supervisors and if that is so as a supervisor you should speak up and say something otherwise you might as well quit and get rehired at that higher salary! If you are being taken advantage of then it’s because you are letting yourself be taken advantage of.
- If you don’t want green beans, then hire those with at least 3 to 5 years of experience, these will have some value add. Those totally experience is likely to have their own manner of doing things and have alot of experience. Unless you’re very chill with that, be prepared that they will be opinionated. Can you take it?
- Think need to hire better HR for this. Clearly HR need to retrain, give more work and increase pay of the supervisor to be fair to her being supervisor of better paid operator or put her to supervise another dept with people not higher paid than her.