Dave Ramsey has built a multimillion-dollar company with some strong core tenants. He recently shared his philosophy on hiring family members of current employees and also those who have previously worked at Ramsey Solutions and left for another company.
“If you work here and your brother wants to come to work here, we almost never do that, because it almost never works. Because if you get mad and quit, he quits too, or we wish he did and we have to fire him,” Ramsey said during his EntreLeadership podcast. “It screws up everything, right? That’s why we don’t do it. We could take an actual really good team member and bring in their sibling, or cousin, or parent, or whatever, who doesn’t do the job, and then we have to deal with the one that doesn’t do the job.
“It affects a good team member and we end up losing both of them. So it’s a net loss to us. We almost never hire family members. One out of 50 times that comes up, we do it,” he admitted. “It has to be everything dialed in and we’ve said all this stuff out loud. And we feel like both players are very mature and there’s a high probability of success for both players and those kinds of things.”
Dave Ramsey went on to say those who depart his company are rarely welcomed back should they seek to return later in their career.
“I’ve got 1,100 people on the team. One of them is a re-hire. One. The reasons you left before are the reasons you’ll probably leave again and I ain’t got time for that,” he stated. “We want people that are planning to stay. It costs too much to onboard, costs too much to go through the hiring process, and so we don’t re-hire, even if you were an immature little intern before and you took off for all the wrong reasons, I’m sorry. It’s just very very seldom do we do a rehire. We got one guy — his nickname’s ‘Unicorn.’ We’ve got one guy out of 1,100 that’s a rehire.
“And I’ve had a whole bunch of after the ‘Great Resignation’ who wandered off to better, greener pastures, and they come back around. ‘Man, did I screw up. I sure wish…’ Well, yeah, wish not, we don’t re-hire, because the next time there’s a dadgum greener pasture, you’ll take off again.”
