Recruitment, Selection, and Development: The People System 127 the job is a good fit. Better to find out now that the employee will not be a good fit than later on. Once you have completed the interviewing process, prop- erly applied all of the appropriate civil service rules and regula- tions, and tentatively made your selections, don't forget to check the background of the leading candidates. You would be amazed how often shady people who are skilled at giving excel- lent interviews get selected because government managers fail to take the time to check their references. Let me give you several examples of government managers who were caught off guard and selected the wrong candidates simply because they looked good. On one occasion, a longtime government employee was selected to be an EEO investigator. The problem here was that her supervisor had not checked with her previous office, which might have advised him that she had just admitted retaliating against another employee for filing an EEO complaint. On a separate occasion, a government supervisor selected a candidate for a trainee position without looking into his back- ground and/or looking closely at his SF-171 (the official appli- cation form used at the time to apply for jobs with the federal government). It turned out that he had been convicted of mur- der. While he was eventually removed from the government, a lot of time, energy, and money were wasted on his situation. Orientation and Training An employee's first year on the job is usually considered to be the last part of the examining process. This is because it pro- vides the government with the opportunity to watch the em- ployee and determine whether she is a good fit. By the same