So we hired a new network admin about a month back because we had a position that we needed to fill due to a previous admin leaving for a different company. The org has roughly 50 locations. Due to the job market it took us a while to find anyone management though was worth making an offer, but so far this guy has been underwhelming to say the least. He supposedly has a CCNP and seemed to be able to answer all the technical questions that I had, but so far he has been underwhelming.

Within the first week while working on a ticket he managed to accidentally shutdown the link for a point to point link to a DR site. The interface is labeled so I don't understand how you accidentally do that. Even for the most basic issue he seems to want to look at a network diagram when either we don't have a current one or at the very I fail to see how it would help him. Another issue I assigned him to figure out why a switch I setup was having issues with a specific VLAN. He compared the config against another switch without an issue and the only thing he noticed was some trivial difference of the hash of a certification "might" be the problem. I explained to him that the hashes would always be different. In hindsight I probably should have asked more/better technical questions, but compared to the other people we interviewed this guy was actually better. He talked with TAC which noticed that I had missed adding the VLAN to the trunk. Easy enough to address, but he lets the TAC rep "fix" it by replacing the trunk with the single VLAN that was previously missing breaking access to all the other devices on the switch. Most of us have at one point forgot to put add in there when adding a VLAN, but that seems more like a jr mistake. I thought maybe that this was new job jitters, but I'm starting to doubt it. I gave him some an SOP for cutting over a circuit and he transposed the directions and I had to go back and fix his mistakes. I wouldn't judge him for making a mistake here or there because I know I have, but I'm pretty sure that I have made fewer mistakes in my time in my current job and I have worked at the company longer than this guy. Being that this guy is still pretty fresh and all of the other candidates that recruiting found in >2 months were worse I'm reluctant to recommend management to cut this guy on a whim, but I am wondering at what point should I recommend management to cut our losses on this guy? I don't want to seem like I am being whiney to management that I just want a rock star coworker to make my job easier, but I don't want to have to a drag dead weight coworker forever either. I'm starting to wonder whether he lucked out in the interview. I'm not his direct supervisor so it wouldn't be my decision to fire him, but I have been with the org long enough that if I made a strong case they probably would strongly consider any suggestion I made.

I have kept management largely in the loop about the things that this guy has mangled up, but so far they haven't asked me whether I think that they should let him go. What would you do in this situation?