How often do professors regret accepting particular graduate students (i.e., "bad hires")?

Question

How often PIs have to deal with "bad hires" in their lab/group? I sometimes hear the PI/trainee relationship be compared to marriages, where half ends in a divorce. There are also posts like these that reinforce this. Is there actual truth to this? I think most of the PIs (principal investigators) I've met have handled this situation professionally, but I do wonder how they actually feel.

Specifically: how often does it happen that professors regret hiring particular grad students? How is this typically dealt with? What is the typical nature of the problem?

Answer 1

I've discussed this with a few line managers, I've hired a few people, and I've checked with headhunters. We all come to very similar numbers**.

Once you're doing the recruiting well, you can expect that for every five people you hire, on average one will be an extremely good hire, and three will do the job well enough. And the fifth will be regrettable, through some combination of lack of will, lack of ability, an absence of a shared understanding of what the role requires, & personality clashes. You can try moving them to different roles, get them more training, work with them to find out what they need. Sometimes one of those things will work. Sometimes, none will.

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** _{My primary dataset is academia. I got similar answers from the wider market for professionals (not manual workers)}

Answer 2

I've only had a handful of PhD students and postdocs. Of these, only one turned out to be a "bad hire" -- he did almost nothing in his year of candidature, and I caught him lying to me and to others more than once. After trying everything -- offering alternative projects and easier starting tasks, offering time management and planning training, directing him to free counselling services -- I and his co-supervisor implemented a performance management plan, and discontinued his scholarship when he did not respond. For me, this was a lesson to vet references carefully before taking on a student.

I also regularly host visiting Masters-level students for 3-month internships/research projects. Some of these work out better than others. Some are a little lazy or not quite intellectually up to the task, while others are fantastic. With so little at stake, none have been disasters and all have accomplished something in their time, but not all of them would have worked out as PhD students, had that been their aim.

Answer 3

From the people I have talked to (i'm a postdoc myself) it happens and it seriously sucks. Firing postdocs or throwing out students is very difficult and even if you succeed it will likely take so long that the project would be nearly over by the time the wheels of beauracracy finish grinding.

Add that to the fact that most projects only have a small number of PhD students and postdocs and it can be very difficult to salvage a research project where bad people were hired.