I’ve heard employers complain about employees for most of my working life. They can’t find anybody dependable. Nobody wants to work. The new employee has a bad attitude, can’t handle the pressure, won’t take direction, or isn’t what the company thought they were getting.

Sometimes they’re absolutely right. There are bad employees, and I’m not interested in pretending every employee who fails was somehow failed by management first. But before an employer spends too much time complaining about the person they hired, there’s a pretty obvious question to ask: Why did you hire them? That’s where some of the responsibility moves back across the desk.

If somebody lies during the hiring process, there’s only so much you can do about that. People can interview well and work poorly. Someone can start strong and change six months later. You can do everything reasonably well during hiring and still get it wrong.

But that’s not every bad hire.

Sometimes you hired somebody because you desperately needed another person on the schedule. Sometimes you ignored things that bothered you because you were short-staffed. Sometimes the interview didn’t tell you much more than whether the applicant had transportation, could pass the basic screening, and could start Monday.

Then three months later you’re complaining they aren’t a good fit. Maybe they aren’t. But if your hiring process never really tried to figure out whether they were a good fit in the first place, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

I understand what being short-staffed does to the decision. People are working overtime. Somebody needs a day off. Work isn’t getting done. That empty spot on the schedule starts making almost any reasonably qualified applicant look better.

That’s also when it’s easy to make an expensive mistake.

A person can meet every minimum qualification and still be wrong for the job. They can have the degree, certification, license, experience, or whatever else you require on paper and still not have the temperament or work habits the position needs.

I don’t get much from an interview if I’m asking questions everybody already knows how to answer. “What’s your biggest weakness?” “Where do you see yourself in five years?” “Are you a team player?” The applicant knows they’re supposed to give the right answer, I know they’re trying to give the right answer, and neither of us learns much about how they’re going to perform six months from now.

I’d rather talk about what actually causes problems. What happens when they’re tired and somebody corrects them? What happens when the work gets boring? How do they respond when a supervisor tells them something they don’t want to hear? How do they deal with a difficult customer, citizen, coworker, or whoever else is standing in front of them?

If the job requires initiative, strange hours, physical discomfort, conflict, working alone, or being held to a standard they may not like every day, I want that in the conversation before I hire them. No interview is going to predict somebody perfectly, but at least we’re talking about the job they’re actually going to have.

The employer also has to describe that job honestly. Recruiting somebody isn’t the same as selling them a version of the job that doesn’t exist. If the hours are bad, tell them. If they’re going to work weekends, tell them. If the starting pay isn’t great, don’t spend the interview talking about what they might make years from now. If advancement is limited, don’t leave somebody thinking they’re going to move up every six months.

If part of the job is boring, frustrating, dirty, stressful, repetitive, or difficult, they need to know that too. I’m not trying to convince every applicant to accept the job. I’d rather find out during the interview that somebody doesn’t want it than six months later after we’ve both invested time in something that was never going to work.

One bad hire happens. Two can happen. A good process can still miss something.

But if you keep hiring people who fail in the same ways, I’d stop looking only at the employees.

Maybe the job description doesn’t match the job. Maybe the interviews aren’t telling you anything useful. Maybe supervisors are hiring whoever is available. Maybe expectations don’t become clear until after somebody gets in trouble. Maybe the organization hasn’t figured out what kind of person actually succeeds there.

Turnover can tell you something too. So can repeated disciplinary problems and hearing employee after employee say, “This isn’t what I thought the job was going to be.” At some point, that’s no longer a collection of unrelated employee problems. That’s information about who you’re choosing and what you’re telling them before they start.

None of this lets employees off the hook. Once you take a job, you have responsibilities. You have to show up, do the work, meet reasonable standards, accept correction, learn the job, and handle what you agreed to take on.

If somebody won’t do those things, deal with it. Coaching doesn’t fix everything. Training doesn’t fix everything. Sometimes somebody simply isn’t going to work out. But when the same kind of failure keeps showing up in person after person, eventually I have to look upstream.

You may still have an employee problem.

You just might have created it before their first day.