Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions

In episode 7 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore the silent turnover crisis that HR teams are missing: 'quiet quitting' — not the viral trend, but the real phenomenon of disengaged high performers scaling back effort without leaving. Lucas shares a 2025 Gallup finding that 57% of employees under 35 are actively quiet quitting, and digs into research from Microsoft's 2024 Work T...

Lucas and Luna challenge the conventional wisdom that hiring decisions should be slow and careful, arguing that firing decisions are often too slow and too careful. They dig into the real cost of retaining a mis-hire, citing a study that puts the total cost of a bad hire at up to 30% of the employee's first-year salary — but those numbers often miss the bigger hit: the drag on team morale, product...

Lucas and Luna dig into the broken mechanics of the standard reference check—why most hiring managers get useless information and how structured reference interviews uncover real candidate fit. Lucas breaks down a specific case from a mid-size tech firm that replaced the traditional two-question call with a behavior-focused reference protocol, cutting bad hires by 30 percent. Luna pushes back on t...

Lucas and Luna break down why a growing number of employers — including Fortune 500 companies like IBM, Bank of America, and Walmart — are ditching mandatory degree requirements and adopting skills-based hiring. They walk through the specific data from a 2025 LinkedIn study showing that roles using skills-based filters saw a 23 percent larger applicant pool and a 14 percent lower first-year turnov...

Lucas and Luna drill into the real financial and cultural cost of a bad hire—beyond the obvious salary waste. Using a mid-size tech company case study, they break down the 6x rule of thumb for hiring mistakes, including onboarding time, team morale, and opportunity cost. Lucas shares a startling stat: a bad mid-level hire can cost a company over $500,000 in direct and indirect losses. Luna pushes...

In this episode of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna challenge the conventional wisdom that exit interviews are the best way to learn why employees leave. Instead, they advocate for the 'stay interview' — a proactive conversation designed to catch retention risks early. Lucas cites a study by the Corporate Executive Board showing that a manager who conducts stay interviews can reduce tu...

In the premiere episode of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna drill into a single startling number: in 2025, the average corporate job posting received 250 applications, up from 59 in 2019. They unpack why the resume black hole is worse than ever, how applicant tracking systems (ATS) really filter candidates, and what a surprising new study from Greenhouse revealed about hiring manager b...