Dick "da wizard" Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner, has a great post up contrasting two schools of thought around hiring:
Briefly, the "No False Positives" school of hiring says that bad hires are worse than no hire because bad employees infect the company with all sorts of issues. Better to march on with nobody filling an important slot than to bring in a sub-par performer.
The hire fast, fire fast approach basically can be boiled down to "it's really almost impossible to understand whether a person is going to be a killer A+ match before they start working with you day to day, so best to find somebody that seems close enough, and then remove them quickly if they don't work out."
Dick offers some useful observations and concludes that the "Hire Fast, Fire Fast" approach only really works when hiring salespeople. For all other positions, it's better to not hire than hire someone who might be bad.
